Lots of people get put off computers just because they have to be plugged into all sorts of other bits and bobs and aren't much use until the floor's covered with wires and the TV set looks like a porcupine. But that's part of the excitement of the little beasts — the handy little accessories they let you use.

Take disk drives for instance. 10 times as efficient as cassette, cheaper than compact discs, more fun than a triple decker ice cream, disk drives (always with a 'k' if you please, as opposed to CD which has settled for an olde-worlde 'c') have a lot to offer, particularly for the musical fraternity.

What's so demanding about music in particular? Well, mainly the fact that it's a realtime discipline — however slowly you program or compose, you have to end up with something which comes off the computer at exactly the speed your audience needs to hear it. In computer terms, this involves storing and replaying large numbers of digits very quickly, and to get these sort of quantities stored digitally on a conventional cassette is a very tedious business.

The floppy disk, or floppy, isn't dissimilar to a cassette tape in construction. It's plastic-based and is covered in a ferrous coating which allows it to record magnetic changes.

In use with a computer, these aren't changing levels intended to translate back into sound as in a cassette player, but streams of digits which only make sense to the digital counters of the computer.

When you're playing back a piece of music composed on a computer, these digits are retrieved and converted into the sort of signals needed to reproduce your piece — perhaps into MIDI Note On/Note Off information in a MIDI computer compositional package. But there have been experiments with the digital recording of sound in more direct ways — notably from the hi-fi world of the Compact Disc.

Yes, the Compact Disc uses digital recording techniques, although in this case playback is via a laser beam reader and there's no magnetic manipulation involved. So how about using a floppy disk to store a digital recording?

CompuSonics

An American company, CompuSonics, has recently done just that, and while the initial results are unspectacular, they promise much for the future. The limitation on a floppy's recording capabilities lie largely in its capacity — a standard five and a quarter inch floppy can record about five minutes' worth of high-quality sound on each side using their DSP-1000 system.

Even this is only achieved using some cunning manipulation techniques. To save disk space, the company have carefully analysed which components of a sound are really necessary for the human ear to appreciate it. Everything else is filtered out by the system software after conversion to digital form by an analogue to digital convertor not unlike those found in CD players.

Once compressed in this way, the information is stored on disk, and when it's replayed the software replaces the information not recorded. These psycho-acoustic methods produce a playback indistinguishable from that of a conventional recording, and of approximately the same quality as a Compact Disc. You can play live into the system, which looks similar to a CD player, and immediately replay your piece of music with very high fidelity — some readers may remember the system being demonstrated on Tomorrow's World with a group of trombonists, and if it can cope with trombones it can cope with anything!

The first CompuSonics models can record about 10 minutes of music on a floppy, but it's expected that improvements in software, in the density of the tracks which can be put on a disc and in the compression method can increase this to about 45 minutes per side. The technology's based on that of industrial digital recorders in the £30,000 range, but within a couple of years we should see it coming down to the Compact Disc price bracket.

The advantage, of course, is that you can make your own recordings with Compact Disc quality on floppies, which are very cheap. Compact Discs are more common in the shops these days than they have been in the past, but they may not be winners in the end — obviously a system which allowed you to re-record would be much more popular, and VHS Hi-Fi or Beta Hi-Fi are already being suggested as possible opponents from the world of video.

To go back to recording on floppies though, the possible implications for the musician are enormous. Firstly, since recording is controlled largely by software rather than by hardware, you could theoretically trade off your recording time against the number of discrete tracks used. In other words — if you could have 40 minutes of stereo recording time, you could have 20 minutes of four-track time or 10 minutes of eight-track time, with every recording independently addressed and independently accessible th rough software.

Once the principle's been established, there's no theoretical limit to the number of tracks you could have. A few years ago nobody would have believed it possible to put eight tracks of analogue recording on quarter-inch tape as Fostex did — in 10 years' time, we may be amazed by the first 48-track recording to be produced on a single small floppy disk.

For greater effect

But it doesn't end there, and this may be where your home computer comes back into the picture. Once you have sound in digitised form, it should be possible manipulate it in all sorts of ways, as we already do with recorded MIDI information. Repeating a group of digits would create an echo effect, while multiplying or dividing values would produce pitch shifts. Do this cyclically and you have a vibrato or chorus, and all sorts of variations such as spliced or combined sounds should be possible. The limitations will simply be in the imagination shown in the software programming.

It should be possible, then, to build a unit which will record sounds with digital quality, multitrack them with perfect synchronisation, and add effects with no unwanted degeneration. If you want an echo unit, instead of buying a few hundred pounds' worth of hardware, all you need is a new software disc. Your computer could perhaps become that digital delay, manipulating part of the total sound before returning it to the floppy recorder.

[It could] generate sounds in software too, as the Fairlight or Synclavier do but without the reliance on expensive hardware. Ultimately we may see a machine which is synthesizer, multitrack and mastering machine all in one.

The frightening part of this prospect is that, barring market manipulation, all this could be yours for little more than the price of a good hi-fi. If anybody who had a hi-fi could afford a 48-track studio, the effects on the music business hardly bear thinking about. It may be wonderful, it may be awful, but it's sure to be interesting.

In the US, the CompuSonics system is to be marketed through a small number of selected retailers. What call there will be for the system as it stands, with a recording capacity of 10 minutes, is open to debate, and there are no plans yet for UK distribution. However, things look very promising for the future, particularly if you've had a little experience in floppy disk and computer manipulation. In that case, you're going to be much better equipped to appreciate the start of the greatest revolution in sound recording since the invention of the wax cylinder.