This isn't the first time we've talked about music generated from floppy drives. A few years ago we published a list of the best YouTube videos on the genre, and in May 2015 we were amazed by the Floppy Orgel. Now it's Floppotron's turn, a new project that drastically expands the original Imperial March made with two drives. In total, Floppotron uses 64 floppy drives, two scanners, eight hard drives, and several controllers to coordinate the entire orchestra.
Mortal Kombat, Ghostbusters, Beverly Hills Cop, Darude, Michael Jackson, Daft Punk, PSY... what do these names have in common? In essence, they all came to be performed, one way or another, by an orchestra of floppy drives. Depending on the number of drives, the enthusiast can add extra channels and develop more complex themes, but if we look back, it all began with a couple of floppy drives and the Imperial March from Star Wars. Thanks to the low cost of the hardware involved (after all, many recycling centers let it go for pennies) and the versatility of systems like the Arduino platform, Paweł Zadrożniak is back with his Floppotron. Observe, and listen:
64 floppies, eight hard drives, two scanners, several Arduino Uno modules as controllers, a chilling amount of cables and the miracle that nothing caught fire make up the Floppotron, which according to its creator is version 2.0. His videos about floppy drives return to the attack after four years, and as could not be otherwise, its "relaunch" references the opening of Star Wars, and the unmistakable Imperial March. His next video plays a version of Smells Like Teen Spirit, while the last published one uses the music from the Hawaii Five-O series.
On his official page we find all the technical details behind the Floppotron, and although he explains that the application was written in Python 2.7, the code doesn't seem to be available yet. What Paweł is doing is accepting requests, and after his three demos, the names don't stop appearing in the YouTube comments. If you want to hear a song in "floppy version", you lose nothing by leaving one or two suggestions...
