Gadget
Drive A:
A disk drive head stepping across a track or two.
- Length
- 63 ms
- Brightness
- warm · 1929 Hz
- Recipe
- 3 layers
- Plays as
- down, up, double, scroll
What it sounds like
A disk drive head stepping across a track or two: a low motor buzz with a quick triple chatter on top. It is grainy, mechanical and a little grumpy, as if the drive were busy. Each click feels like it moved something inside the machine.
Good for
- Retro computing streams and emulator sessions
- File management, which seems only right
- People who miss the sound of a machine doing work
How it is made
A 95 Hz square wave low-passed at 1.8 kHz for the motor, a burst of white noise around 2 kHz for the head, and a second noise burst at 1.2 kHz repeated three times, 14 ms apart, for the stepper chatter.
Every qliqr sound is synthesised from a small text recipe, so the version you hear here is the same one the Mac app plays, with natural variation so no two presses are identical.