Description:

FloppiMusic 0.1

The Floppi-Music project aims at creating a “crazily advanced” floppy
music library for the Raspberry Pi, written in pure Python.

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”

License

For personal and professional use. You cannot resell or redistribute these repositories in their original state.

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