Jonas writes from Denmark to tell me that his band Batch Totem have released an album 'Trunkeret & Ikonisk', on a single floppy disk: "The audio is encoded in the GSM 6.10 WAV format [used to compress speech in GSM mobile phones] at various bitrates the disk holds 74 minutes of audio, that can be played on a computer with standard audio-players like Winamp, Windows Media Player and Itunes without any external codec installed." The music has been created specially for the format, (or as he put is "composed directly in the spectral domain") He says: "On certain tracks the amplitude and low bitrates produce 'ghost' frequencies according to the Nyquist theorem, and the algorithm of the audio codec meaning that very high frequencies and white noise can occur at very low bitrates. Using listening equipment with a subwoofer is recommended." There's a free sample track here: A Minor Prism Glow Number (42kb wav file, seems to play better in Windows Media than Quicktime, does cool things to the visualiser). I think it's safe to say that Britney won't be calling on Batch Totem to do her comeback album. Be sure to visit the Batch Totem website (it's just a directory - HTML is so last year). Previously: Dude releases album on NES cartridge
Posted by Tom Whitwell.
Comments:
big props to these guys, sounds like the album would be right at home on two of my favorite labels--20kbps rec from switzerland who release only low-bit encodes and floppyswop.co.uk who have been releasing 1.4meg peices for years now. Check their archives--tons to sift through!
is the demo track really minimal mostly silent with random sine clusters that fade in and stop? not sure if Im hearing it right, using quicktime to play.
Also, cool concept. music needs to become something more physical now that most people rape the mp3s.
: 8:23 pm