He’s given us the full instructions, and no doubt a more permanent version could be built with a 3D-printed case. The player would have been a major undertaking when the floppy was king, but in 2020 it’s simply a USB floppy drive, a Raspberry Pi, and a battery pack. With some nifty manipulation of the compression command line and the judicious removal of some unnecessary metadata, the album can fit on a floppy in equivalent quality to the AM radio fans would have heard it over back in 1964. It came about with the realization that half an hour of extremely compressed audio could be squeezed onto a standard 3.5 inch floppy, and then that the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night album comes in at only a shade over that time. Seemingly not for though, who has made a portable audio player that uses a floppy disk as its storage medium. It found its way into a few unexpected uses such as Sony’s Mavica line of digital cameras, but outside those who maintain and use older equipment it’s now ancient history. Some formatting utilities allow distinguishing between a quick format, which does not erase all existing data and a long option that does erase all existing data.We remember the floppy disk as the storage medium most of us used two decades or more ago, limited in capacity and susceptible to data loss. In some operating systems all or parts of these three processes can be combined or repeated at different levels and the term 'format' is understood to mean an operation in which a new disk medium is fully prepared to store files.

The third part of the process, usually termed 'high-level formatting' most often refers to the process of generating a new file system. Partitioning is the common term for the second part of the process, dividing the device into several sub-devices and, in some cases, writing information to the device allowing an operating system to be booted from it. The first part of the formatting process that performs basic medium preparation is often referred to as 'low-level formatting'. In some cases, the formatting operation may also create one or more new file systems.

Disk formatting is the process of preparing a data storage device such as a hard disk drive, solid-state drive, floppy disk, memory card or USB flash drive for initial use.

How to properly format floppy disk a