Dino Fizzotti's Diskplayer Uses 3.5" Floppy Disks as Physical "Recordings" of Spotify Albums

Engineer Dino Fizzotti has come up with an interesting way to load his favorite albums and artists on streaming music service Spotify: 3.5" floppy disks.

Holding, in their most common incarnations, either 720kB (Double Sided Double Density) or 1.44MB (Double Sided High Density), floppy disks are an all-but extinct medium. They're certainly not something you'd think of if you wanted to store digital music, being able to hold at best a single song in a halfway-decent-bitrate MP3 file.

Fizzotti's approach, though, requires only a few bytes per album - by streaming the required music instead. "Diskplayer is a project I created which combines the nostalgia of physical media with some of the practicalities of on-line streaming music," Fizzotti explains. "My original idea was to use RFID tags on random vinyl records to identify Spotify albums as they were placed on a record player. I developed this concept on and off for a few years, and had bits of working hardware and software in various stages, but after a few years I grew to like the idea of reducing the project complexity (in size and moving parts).

"In 2017 I was off sick for a few days and ended up binge watching a bunch of Techmoan, LGR and The 8-Bit Guy videos, which seeded in me the idea of using floppy disks. This meant I could remove the RFID tags and reader, and read and write Spotify URIs directly to the disks! Much simpler, and the hardware did not need any construction. A simple USB floppy disk drive and a Raspberry Pi would do the trick."

Having picked up colorful floppy disks from an online auction site, Fizzotti printed album art labels for each. Using a custom Spotify client written in Go, Fizzotti is able to capture the album URLs from Spotify and write them to each floppy disk — "recording" them. When a new disk is inserted into a USB floppy drive connected to a Raspberry Pi, the player looks for this "recording" and if present automatically starts streaming the album.

"Starting a project is easy, I've done it hundreds of times," Fizzotti notes. "Finishing a project is a much rarer occurrence! My initial entry in my notebook for the idea of using a physical format to represent digital media dates to 2013. I'm really happy with how it has turned out 7 years later. I learnt many things along the way (some things which never made it at all into the final solution). And now I have a really awesome way to listen to music."

Fizzotti's full write-up is available on his personal website; the Diskplayer client can be found on his GitHub repository, though he warns that he does "not intend to 'support' this code," seeing it as a one-off learning experience that will not receive further development.