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Comment by poisonarena | Hacker News Reader

I get the cassette thing because that was an audio format people used for albums, but in the 90s nobody released albums on floppy discs, so this is like all gimmick

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There's always that one exception - Brian Eno released a floppy disk album called Generative Music 1 in 1996. It required Windows 95 and a Sound Blaster AWE32 to play:

https://intermorphic.com/sseyo/koan/generativemusic1/

"The works I have made with this system symbolise, to me, the beginning of a new era of music. Until a hundred years ago, every musical event was unique: music was ephemeral and unrepeatable, and even classical scoring couldn't guarantee precise duplication. Then came the gramophone record, which captured particular performances, and made it possible to hear them identically, over and over again.

But now, there are three alternatives: live music, recorded music, and generative music. Generative music enjoys some of the benefits of both its ancestors. Like live music, it is always different. Like recorded music, it is free of time-and-place limitations — you can hear it when and where you want.

Edit: There is a YouTube recording of someone's generated version of Lysis (Tungsten) from the album:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgbbYLSNbfg

> nobody released albums on floppy discs

You're forgetting that for many people, part of their early exposure to music is music from within computer games, not just music released as standalone albums.

Much of my favorite music as a kid were soundtracks from 8 bit video games, demoscene releases and background music from loaders and cracks. They also influenced my early tastes/trajectories: I discovered Mike Oldfield, Jean Michel Jarre, and OMD from a single C64 SID release.

All traded on 5-1/2 floppies among friends.

The whole gist behind vaporwave is that is's a vision of the future that never came to pass. So it's appropriate that music was not commonly released on floppy disc.

I am going to declare there is no unifying theory to Vape wave

I remember in those days there was a lot of "demo scene" music that was traded electronically. Not usually by floppy disc, but, well, it could have been.

(Surprising no vaporwave artists has gone this route: release a vaporwave "album" on floppy disc, done entirely in ScreamTracker, and recommended to be played ideally on your Gravis Ultrasound...)

The Yamaha Disklavier has a floppy library. Hal Leonard still sells Pianosoft https://www.halleonard.com/search/search.action?menuid=3984&...

There were also diskettes with standard MIDI files voiced for General MIDI for karaoke & education, playable on the Roland SoundBrush (sequence player for the SoundCanvas synth) and MT-80S https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ks3ucumilU and the Yamaha MDP10 "boomboxes" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikneZi7vUsE

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