Parts

• Floppy Disks
• Printer Labels
• Frame

Background

As part of my Floppy Disk Walkman project, I asked my friends to send me a couple of floppies. Alistair and @gas_liverpool both sent me loads. So I needed something to do with them!

Close Ups

Note!

• What a "classic" floppy label looks like, and what you remember it looking like, can be two different things.
• I also can't afford a colour printer - so I stuck with black & white on colourful floppies.
• I'm not a graphic designer. Thankfully, neither were most of the people who designed floppy labels back in the day. If graphic design is your passion, feel free to improve these!
• The labels don't have the rounded corners of proper labels.

GLaDOS - from Portal

Are you still there?

Bandersnatch - from Netflix's Bandersnatch

I used an open source Teletext Font called Bedstead rather than the more corporate Courier.

Holly - from Red Dwarf

I thought a dot-matrix style vision of Holly would be a nice touch.

A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer - from The Diamond Age

Using the Reenie Beanie font and a bit of groovy clipart.

Janet - from The Good Place

The font is close enough

Polybius - from the arcade

I spent so much money on this arcade game back when I was a kid. Not so easy to find nowadays.

Mother - from Alien

I made great use of this excellent article about the typography of Alien.

WOTAN - from Doctor Who

This was a difficult one to get right. The font is not Westminster!

Clayton Hickman

@claytonhickman

Just noticed the War Machines title font isn't one of the regular typefaces I assumed it was. Was it specially made? pic.x.com/jiyfllgl8d

---

I grabbed the title card and manually recreated the font.

WOPR - from War Games

A slightly modified copy of the games list from WOPR. Using a reconstructed font

Rejected Ideas

Originally, I thought about making disks of Vapourware. Things like "Commander Keen: The Universe Is Toast!" and "Half-Life 2: Episode Three" - but I really couldn't find enough good titles.

So, I asked on Twitter:

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Which fictional bit of software would you like a copy of?

(As in some program you've seen in books, TV, films, songs, etc.)

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Some of the suggestion were brilliant, but a bit hard to implement. What does the software disk for Blade Runner's Zoom Enhance look like?

Famous Movie Floppies

There are only a few popular movies which feature floppies prominently. And none looked particularly cool. Besides, there's nothing interesting about just copying someone else's artwork.

Here are some that I considered.

Hackers

The floppies on display don't have anything interesting written on them.

Similarly, what does The Gibson look like?

Alien

The floppy disk props were never actually used.

The Net

We all love Sandra Bullock, and The Net is a fine movie. But this is hardly an iconic shot.

Red Dwarf

I lol'd, but I wanted something a bit more like real software disk.

Better Than Life is a brilliant bit of software, but there are no product shots.

Star Trek

LCARS was a popular request. But it is so colourful, that it's hard to show on a black and white printer.

What's next?

Not sure. I'm painfully aware that most of these are AI systems, rather than discrete software. I have no need for a colour printer - so I don't think I'll upgrade these. And I don't think I'm a good enough designer to make many more. So this will just sit as a curio on my wall.

(Here I mean wave based audio of human speech. It's trivial to fit more in using MIDI or speech synthesis.)

I'm going to use "A Podcast Of Unnecessary Detail" to experiment with, as this blogpost also has too much detail. The podcast is a 39MB MP3, running just over half-an-hour.

Here's the first 40 seconds of the original MP3 file, so you can hear the music, and male and female voices.

That's about 800KB. A floppy can hold about a minute and a half of that quality audio.

Squash it down

A floppy disk holds about 11,000 Kilobits. So, to hold 1,800 seconds (30 minutes) of audio, we need to encode audio at about 6kbps (Kilobits per second)

By coincidence, the Opus audio format supports encoding speech at around 6Kbps.

Here's the same sample of the podcast bounced down to mono and encoded at 6Kbps. The voices are pretty clear, but the music is extremely mushy. (The following files are in .opus format. They should play fine on Android and most desktop browsers).

Encoded using opusenc in.wav --downmix-mono --bitrate 6 out.opus

But that's still a little too big. The 33 minute podcast weighs in at 1,581,781 Bytes. Too large for a floppy.

Using the --framesize option, we can set the Framesize to 60 milliseconds. Not great for streaming, but we don't care about that, and it makes the files much smaller.

But opusenc has a few more tricks up its sleeve! Using --cvbr we can force the encoder never to go above a bitrate limit.

So, using opusenc in.wav --downmix-mono --bitrate 6 --cvbr --framesize 60 out.opus we can save 33 minutes, 8 seconds, in 1,422,676 Bytes. Enough space left over on a floppy disk for an image.

But wait! There's more!

Surprisingly, the opusenc documentation is not quite telling us the whole story! You can pass any number lower than 6 to opusenc and it will try its best.

In practice, the lowest bitrate it will generate for speech is about 4Kbps. Here's the same sample:

opusenc in.wav --downmix-mono --bitrate 4 out-4.opus

What's the lowest we can go? How low before we lose all meaning?

The absolutely lowest encoding which produced any sound at all was 1.2Kbps. I warn you, this sounds awful!

opusenc in.wav --downmix-mono --bitrate 1.2 --hard-cbr out-1.2-hard.opus

This uses the --hard-cbr option which forces the encoder to a specific constant bitrate.

About the lowest you can go and still have things even vaguely intelligible was 2Kbps. Again, this sounds horrible, but it is just about possible to understand most of the speech. Even if they do sound like Daleks with low batteries!

opusenc in.wav --downmix-mono --bitrate 2 --hardcbr out-2-hard.opus

If you were prepared to have you audio that shitty, you can just about squeeze a full hour of speech onto an old floppy disk.

So, guess what tomorrow's blog post is going to be...?

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