MP3 Player? Nah. CD Player? Nah. Floppy Player? HELL YEA.

HotDog-Cart · Post by **HotDog-Cart** » Wed May 07, 2008 8:35 pm

Hey guys. I have a crazy idea.

I want to go old school. Not too old though, but old.

I want to make a Floppy Player.

Description: A music player that runs off floppy diskettes. Each time you want to hear a new song, you put in a new floppy. The music player will clip onto your belt, so it acts as a belt buckle too. LCD screen is optional.

This may seem to be a stupid idea, but I've wanted to try it forever. Now heres where the problem comes in.

An Idea of mine is like this. Buy a Cheap Discman, and modify its ribon cable (Buy a Ribon to IDE connector?) and power cable so I could hook a floppy drive up to it. That'd be the easiest way.

Yet:

Will that method of mine, even work?

And, If it cant work, How can I make a floppy disk drive: Read a floppy, play the music file off the floppy, have a built in headphone jack AND put sound through the headphone jack to the headphones? (and be powered and such.)

Basically: If my method listed above (with the Discman) doesnt work, how could I make this another way?

I want to do this. xD

Please help.

Post by **bicostp** » Wed May 07, 2008 8:42 pm

Floppy drives aren't IDE.

You'll need a controller circuit to interface with the drive but I don't see why you couldn't get it to work with the right hardware and code.

Once oversight: Any full-length song encoded in MP3 format and compressed enough to fit on a floppy will sound terrible.

You might want to make something like a floppy based MIDI or MOD player. (Then you could also get dozens of songs on a floppy.)

EDIT: Here's someone who made a portable MOD player that uses SD cards. You could do something similar with a floppy drive.

http://www.k9spud.com/traxmod/

HotDog-Cart · Post by **HotDog-Cart** » Wed May 07, 2008 8:45 pm

Yea, I meant the other thingy. Not IDE but the smaller one for floppys. xD

I checked out the link. That seems pretty hard, I'm looking for an easy way to get this to work. Very little coding (I HATE coding. xD), and very little work involved. Yea, I could just put MIDIs on the floppy instead MP3s.

Is there anyway I could get a ribon Cable to floppy adapter? So I could just get a cheap discman and take the CD drive out of it and put a floppy drive in, instead? (Would it be easier if I use a USB floppy drive, instead of a standard PC one?)

If so, could I get a ribon cable to USB convert and do the same thing?

tom61 · Post by **tom61** » Wed May 07, 2008 9:06 pm

HotDog-Cart wrote:Yea, I meant the other thingy. Not IDE but the smaller one for floppys. xD

Floppy interface.

Is there anyway I could get a ribon Cable to floppy adapter? So I could just get a cheap discman and take the CD drive out of it and put a floppy drive in, instead? (Would it be easier if I use a USB floppy drive, instead of a standard PC one?)

No, they use a completely different electrical and protocol format. The ribbon cable is spinning the drive and reading from the laser, it corresponds to nothing standard.

I checked out the link. That seems pretty hard, I'm looking for an easy way to get this to work. Very little coding (I HATE coding. xD), and very little work involved. Yea, I could just put MIDIs on the floppy instead MP3s.

The easiest way would be to get a Linux portable system with USB host (Nokia 770 comes to mind) and have that read from USB floppy. Even with that you'll likely to have to compile a few modules (not coding, just compiling them for the device).

arfink · Post by **arfink** » Wed May 07, 2008 9:25 pm

Yes, pretty much what you are trying to do is, well... a serious engineering project, and one which would be quite a nightmare indeed. I have done work with data storage systems before- it's quite complex, especially if you have never done anything with it before. If you don't enjoy working hard and writing code and burning chips etc. ad nauseum then this will not be an easy project for you. HOWEVER there is one possibility for an "easy" solution- you could attempt to wire the components of the drive into the guts of a tape player. However, you'd still need a control circuit, and here is why:

The tape is linear, aka a straight line of tape running past the head, which picks up the audio signals. The disk, on the other hand, is circular and has data winding in a spiral. Only problem is that unlike a record, which has to play in a single spiral pattern, a disk is designed to be read or written to from anywhere. Thus the drive head has to be told how to move in addition to just spinning the disk. So you would need to make the head move at the same time as the disk and trace a spiral on the disk. And read data which would then have to be converted digital to analog and then amplified, etc. And of course, the disks would not be even remotely readable then in a regular computer- you would need to record your music to them just like you record to a cassette tape.

So yeah, a lot of work. If you'd like to try though go ahead. I'm sure it would have a lot of "geek appeal" if you could pull it off. Good luck though!

Raithah · Post by **Raithah** » Wed May 07, 2008 9:44 pm

I present to you the second simplest solution to your problem - the MintyMP3. It made it's rounds about the Intertubes a while back, so as a refresher to anyone that didn't catch it the first time; this is a homemade DAP with the ability to run off of compact flash cards.

Now, why is a compact flash card so important ? Well, as she eloquently puts it, they speak ATA :D. You can probably see where I'm going with this. I figure, if you can hack the code (or pay someone to do it for you) it should work. Probably. Maybe.

The simplest solution is to go buy a portable cassette player and dubbing station, which is basically what you described.

Post by **marshallh** » Thu May 08, 2008 1:44 pm

HotDog-Cart · Post by **HotDog-Cart** » Thu May 08, 2008 2:59 pm

Raithah wrote:I present to you the second simplest solution to your problem - the MintyMP3. It made it's rounds about the Intertubes a while back, so as a refresher to anyone that didn't catch it the first time; this is a homemade DAP with the ability to run off of compact flash cards.

Now, why is a compact flash card so important ? Well, as she eloquently puts it, they speak ATA . You can probably see where I'm going with this. I figure, if you can hack the code (or pay someone to do it for you) it should work. Probably. Maybe.

The simplest solution is to go buy a portable cassette player and dubbing station, which is basically what you described.

First: Floppy's arent ATA. So how would this work?
Second: What do you mean, dubbing station? I don't get it.

timmeh87 · Post by **timmeh87** » Thu May 08, 2008 11:06 pm

If you are going through the effort a floppy drive is the wrong choice.

Flash memory is obvious.

What about DVDs. lol

console memory cards
zip drive
ram?
usb drives

evilteddy · Post by **evilteddy** » Fri May 09, 2008 2:49 am

If you want to show off geekdom with your music player make an adapter that will play using a cd rom drive. Check jaycar, there is a kit that you make, comes with a remote control and will interface with a cd rom drive to play music.

Dr. KillGood · Post by **Dr. KillGood** » Fri May 09, 2008 2:51 am

evilteddy wrote:If you want to show off geekdom with your music player make an adapter that will play using a cd rom drive. Check jaycar, there is a kit that you make, comes with a remote control and will interface with a cd rom drive to play music.

They died a while ago, or they are just too cheap to have a website anymore.

EDIT: Oh I see how it is, they changed the name from "Jaycarelectronics.com" to "jaycar.com" WTF

bacteria · Post by **bacteria** » Fri May 09, 2008 4:06 am

Even if you manage to make it work, three practical problems come to min:

1) size and weight (inc batteries).
2) a floppy disk is 1.2mb which will be bad quality as you would need to compress a song to low quality to make it fit. How about using a Zip drive instead??
3) floppy disks are bulky and heavy when you have several of them - no problem if you only want a couple of songs, but this isn't good as you quickly get bored with playing just a small number of tracks.

Nice idea, recycle old stuff; the fact you want to do it is good reason to give it a go, as it will represent a challenge.

HotDog-Cart · Post by **HotDog-Cart** » Fri May 09, 2008 5:35 am

Hmm. Can you link me to the kit in jaycar? And how would I make the kit from jaycar run off floppy's or a zip drive? (LIke how exactly could I create an adapter. I don't get it.)

timmeh87 · Post by **timmeh87** » Fri May 09, 2008 11:52 am

sounds like the kit from jaycar uses the built-in audio output on the CD drive.

so you dont.

evilteddy · Post by **evilteddy** » Fri May 09, 2008 2:24 pm

I suggested the cd playback adaptor as a geeky alternative to the floppy drive player. If you can adapt it to a floppy drive then good on you but as mentioned above I think this would be hard anyway here it is

EDIT: O hey I just had a thought. What if you got an external floppy drive that uses USB and connected that somehow to an mp3 player that can stream stuff over USB.