Floppy drive as an audio sampler

Here’s a floppy drive which is being used as an audio sampler. At first glance we thought this was another offering which drives the stepper motor at a specific frequency to generate that characteristic sound at a target pitch. But that’s not what’s happening at all. The floppy is actually being used as a storage device (go figure).

From what we can tell, it’s being used almost like an 8-track tape. A PWM signal is stored on one circular slice of the disk, then the head can be moved back to that same “track” to play back the wave form. The head doesn’t move during playback, but just keeps reading the same track of bits. To the right you can see an Arduino board. This allows for MIDI control of the track selection. [Alexis] shows off some keyboard control in the video after the break. There’s a buffer chip on the breadboard which allows the audio output to be quickly switched off as the floppy drive head is moved. This keeps garbage out of the sound until the new track can be read.

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arduino-midi-sequencer

This Arduino MIDI sequencer has no shortage of ways to display loop info. The screen above is a touch-sensitive interface that acts as the user input. But if this screen is not visible, you can still see which tracks have activated samples for each beat and what effects are being used. That’s thanks to the collection of display boards which are shown in the video after the break.

The setup acts as the MIDI front end, relying on other hardware to generate the samples. It presents all of the options through several pages on the 320×240 touch screen display. The Ardunio Mega is responsible for monitoring the UI data, crafting and sending the MIDI commands, as well as updating the LED-based display boards. These include bar graphs for the various effects, a four row by sixteen pixel beat pattern display, and 7-segment displays to track the current location within the loop. All in that’s 368 LEDs driven by 18 shift registers.

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Arturia Jupiter-8V Updated to 2.5, Brings Lion and 64-Bit Support With…

Arturia has released an updated to Jupiter-8V, its virtual recreation of Roland’s Classic Jupiter 8 synthesizer.

Here’s what’s new in V2.5:

  • Support for 64-bit VST and Audio Unit
  • Support for Pro Tools 9 & 10
  • Support for Mac OSX 10.7 (Lion)
  • MIDI Control Assignment Improvement

Features:

  • More than 400 high quality and innovative sounding presets
  • Up to 32 voices of polyphony, and a Unison mode
  • A unique audio structure featuring 2 oscillators per voice (16 oscillators in total), 2 LFO’s, 2 filters and 2 envelopes.
  • Keyboard split and layer
  • A set of Analog Sounding Effects: Dual Delay, Phaser, Flanger, all three being largely modulable by any audio source in the synth.
  • 2 digital effects, X and Y.
  • Additional Live-oriented Step-sequencer, additional Galaxy module for advanced modulations
  • Set to Control with your external MIDI keyboard in just a few clicks.
  • Full compatibility with major formats and hosts on Mac OS X and Windows XP (VST, AU, RTAS)
  • Revolutionary preset navigation system called SoundMap

Jupiter-8V is available now for US $249 / EURO 229.

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