Yes, that crazy title is what a maker has managed to do. Specifically, his name is Terence Eden, and he set himself this peculiar challenge as he explained on his own personal blog. The idea was create a walkman that could play music stored on a floppy disk using the famous motherboard Raspberry Pi SBC. And it is that the Arduino and Pi boards go a long way, so it is not strange to see new inventions Every two for three.
If you are over 30 years old, you have surely heard of the famous Walkman, and also of the diskettes, those storage media that could hold a "staggering" 1.44MB. In the case of the first invention, it was the work of the Sony company, and it was first released in 1979, making it possible to play portable music for the first time. I mean, something like the ancestor of more contemporary MP3 players.
Well, Terence Eden He decided to revive that invention with the help of the Raspberry Pi, floppy disks to store his favorite music, and a few other elements (battery, floppy disk, headphones, a USB connector, rubber bands to hold everything… a la McGyver).
Surely you are wondering what is possible, but perhaps you are not so clear how you can put a whole entire Beattles album on a floppy disk if each MP3 song can occupy 2 or 3 MB depending on its length. Well, that was the hardest part, since he had to compress the album to be able to play it on his walkman.
Terence chose the album A Hard's Day Night by the Beattles, which was the shortest of the legendary Liverpool band. It's only about 30 minutes and 45 seconds long, but it's still a lot for a floppy disk. But with the Opus codec, one of the most compressed, Terence Eden was able to lower the bitrate of the songs and allow it to enter completely ... yes, so much that it was almost unrecognizable, with worse results than a radio from a century ago.
More information about the project - Teremce Eden's blog.