A Germany company has shipped a delay fx pedal that uses a floppy drive as magnetic media to run its delay. That’s… interesting… and strikes me as likely to be really noisy, but on stage, probably not enough to care.

What makes me think about it more is data rates. Are they floppy-native digital? Are they formatting mp3? If so, 320kbps is very high quality, and the faster floppies managed 500kbps, so we’re good there, and you could ignore FAT and just write a digital data stream at that speed, it’d work.

But what if you intentionally racked that down? I kind of like the idea of intentionally under-quantising your delay pedal. Crank it down to 48kbps or something, have your delay sound like a cranky land telephone line.

Or maybe they’re bypassing the digital part entirely – what does floppy drive sound like as an analogue magnetic media? What do dropouts sound like on a floppy disk?

That would also let you play with different rotation speeds, of course.

Oh wait, look, they have a video. (Scroll down at the link.) Apparently, it’s analogue. That’s fucked up! I kind of like it. But it does lose the possibility of digital data loss, which – depending upon what you’re going for – is kind of too bad. Low data rates combined with this environment could make some really awful/awesome noise.

eta: In comments, John posted a link to this awesomeness, go play that, you need to right now.