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I'm currently working on a 2HD 3.5 inch floppy disk release of a podcast episode which has taken me down an interesting rabbit hole of low-bitrate audio codecs,
by pilaf 3y ago
I'm currently working on a 2HD 3.5 inch floppy disk release of a podcast episode which has taken me down an interesting rabbit hole of low-bitrate audio codecs, floppy disk aesthetics and label design.
The episode I'm releasing is 1h40m long, which sounds like it couldn't possibly fit in 1.44MB, but there's an obscure but free codec mostly used by digital HAM radio enthusiasts called Codec2 [1] which can encode human voice in as low as 700bit/s (315KB/hr). At that quality setting it sounds like complete garbage, although still barely intelligible, and there are no readily available media players for it (there's not even an established file format) so I'm having to include complicated ffmpeg instructions in a README to get people to play it, but I think it all adds to the charm.
Funnily enough after searching for days for how to fit the original episode in a floppy (tried low-bitrate MP3, Opus and AAC, all of which fail at the task), and after discovering Codec2 almost by chance, I only then came across an article titled "Codec2: a whole Podcast on a Floppy Disk" [2] which I probably would've found if I had started by searching "podcast in a floppy".
1: https://github.com/drowe67/codec2 https://github.com/drowe67/codec2
2: https://auphonic.com/blog/2018/06/01/codec2-podcast-on-floppy-disk/ https://auphonic.com/blog/2018/06/01/codec2-podcast-on-flopp...
- prmoustache 3y agoWouldn'it make more sense to release the transcription as floppy and let receiver use text to speech apps?
- pilaf 3y agoI thought of that as a plan B if I couldn't make the audio fit, but practicality is not so much the goal. The episode is released online at full quality anyway and almost nobody has a floppy drive these days. It's more about having a physical release that listeners can get as a cool looking commemorative item, and preferably one that doesn't cheat (by not actually containing the episode).
- dkarras 3y agoWhat would make sense would be to record it in pristine quality and put it on youtube / spotify etc. This is not for making sense but for art's sake. Working with limitations, pushing the limits. Expanding knowledge. Sometimes gaining cred within a community. Joy of tinkering, curiosity etc.
- tecleandor 3y agoOh Codec2, that's fun! You could also try to run Lyra 2 on a reduced bitrate to see if it can compare. It's more CPU hungry, but it might be fun... https://opensource.googleblog.com/2022/09/lyra-v2-a-better-faster-and-more-versatile-speech-codec.html https://opensource.googleblog.com/2022/09/lyra-v2-a-better-f...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- fsiefken 3y agoThere's also Meta's EnCodec and Vocos at 1.5 kbps, Vocos is amazing: https://gemelo-ai.github.io/vocos/ https://gemelo-ai.github.io/vocos/ So if you format the floppy to 1970 Kilobyte (with the dos tool 2MF 3.0) you could fit around 3 hours on it. Enough to tell the listener about your life story, your most important values, your loves and life lessons and more wisdom for future generations. Long ago I encoded speech in acelp.net wma / realaudio4/5 at 6.5 kbps. That was good enough and better then mp3 speech compression, in these times with a relative abundance of bandwidth or diskspace it's not really necessary. With whisperspeech you could fit and read the bible from a floppy (compressed with for example the PPM text compression codec), 7 days of 12 hours of speech each GPT4 estimated - and you can read it too! State of the art LLM exegesis based on the latest historical-critical methods and theology takes a bit more memory though.
- Solvency 3y ago"I'm currently working on a 2HD 3.5 inch floppy disk release of a podcast episode" Out of curiosity..why?
- pilaf 3y agoMy podcast hit a milestone and I wanted to make something to celebrate it that I could send to some listeners. For a few reasons I decided to go with floppy disks.