Floppi-Music 0.1

Motivation

Everyone is doing floppy music these days, and it really gets old and boring. However, Eike badly wanted to try floppy music himself, and of course I wanted to meet his desire. Our plan was to create the floppy music code in pure Python, and we wanted to use the Raspberry Pi to have a lot of high-level interfaces available.

The final goal is to build a “floppy music jukebox” for presentation at events and conferences.

Implementation / design goals

Our intention was to break loose from the low-level approach to floppy music controller programming and use modern paradigms in a modern language instead.

The floppy music engine is entirely multi-threaded, with a playback engine scheduling playback of notes for the various floppy drive threads.

The framework is designed so it can be easily extended or used as a library. For example, all recognized input formats are parsed by seperate functions and converted to an internal format suitable for playback by the engine. It is easy to create such parsers for any other (sensible) file format.

Wiring scheme

The wiring scheme for the Raspberry and floppy interfaces can be found in WIRING.txt.

What works

• Parsing of MML (Music Macro Language) files, via MMLlib

• Playback of 4 (or 8) simultaneous tracks

• floppi-play command to play recognized, single files through the engine

What is planned (Roadmap)

• Parsing of MIDI files

• A webserver to select tracks and manage a playlist

• An mpd-compatible network interface

• Control through an LCD display and buttons on a controller

• Self-tuning of floppy drives

Credits

Credits go to:

• Felix “theftf” Falk (felix@b9d.de), for the wiring and hardware advice

• Thorsten “mirabilos” Glaser (tg@mirbsd.de), for his floppy drive donation and magically always being right

Awards

The Floppi-Music project has won the following (more or less serious ;-)) awards:

• “Coolest problem of the friggin’ month”-award in #python for “Floppy disk drives being out of tune”