Topic: Ultra-compression

[RavensEyez]

I know this flies in the face of all technological advances, but I need to ultra-compress some music onto a floppy disk. This is not for gaming. I realize I can't get much, but I need to ultra-compress either wav or mp3 to get it into listenable form directly from an exteranl floppy drive. I've tried lowering the bitrate all the way down to 8, which sounded underwater, then 16 which sounds like aliens attacking but.. ugh.. I guess would be OK for this genre.

I had a thought to try and maybe sample it somehow and save it as M03.. maybe I could add bass.dll to the floppy to make it playable on the other side... I'm over my head on this obviously and looking for help.

Is this feasible in any way?

[Dotpitch]

I had a thought to try and maybe sample it somehow and save it as M03... Is this feasible in any way?

It's feasible, but you're not going to get any smaller than with regular MP3 or Vorbis.

Based on not-so-recent listening tests, I would recommend Opus or Apple's AAC HEv2 (in iTunes) well over MP3. Both formats can be played with XMPlay using the appropriate plugins.

[RavensEyez]

Thanks so much for taking a look at this! Appreciate the input immensely.

[Dotpitch]

Just out of curiosity, why are you trying to stuff music on a floppy drive?

[RavensEyez]

Believe it or not... these completely obsolete formats are desirable for very specific genres of music, such as dark ambient like ours. I'm sure you're aware of the vinyl comeback, but cassettes now also sell out quickly and just recently I've seen the floppy releases. It sounds a bit like space hell with that 24kps. I'm surrounded by technology and love it... but sometimes I just wanna give it the finger too. 

A couple of examples:

http://depressiveillusions.com/items/floppy-diskettes
http://www.damned-by-light.com/tapes/distribution_7.html

[raina]

For that sort of thing, I have to recommend tracker music files, with or without MO3 compression. Check out datamask or the old netlabels it was inspired by. (Note that the dates on the site are set 15 years in the past.) For example, the latest release, dust by _zebra, is a 20 minute ambient EP that plays in XMPlay in high quality, fits on a floppy zipped and doesn't even use any lossy compression for its sample data which would bring down the file sizes considerably.