11/10/2007

A band has shunned the now ubiquitous compact disc in favour of an outdated format to release its new album.

Batch Totem, an alias for musician Jonas Olesen, has managed to squeeze 19 heavily-compressed tracks - more than 70 minutes of music - into 1.44MB of space.

The album, which is called Trunkeret & Ikonisk, is compressed in the GSM 6.10 WAV format, at various bitrates. It cannot be converted into mp3 as the timbre of the music will be 'drastically altered', reports PC Pro.

Olesen said: 'The idea is essentially to release an album on an almost obsolete medium that fits very well with the music on an aesthetical level.

'Secondly, the scope of the project is to use heavy compression as a feature that shapes the music, instead of a limitation that reduces.'

Invented by IBM, floppy disks were popular in the 1980s and 1990s but have now been largely superseded by Flash devices, such as memory sticks, and optical storage devices.