You are in my mind and in my heart. This is a constant thought that I have. I grew up in a house where books, vinyls, cds, slides, tapes and other media were everywhere. Some on display, others archived in boxes. Large part of my childhood was spent with me exploring through that stuff and creating custom mixtapes with songs that I really liked. I still have a lot of them.
I also remember my 10 yo self, designing in Corel draw my own labels and printing them to fit the tape case.
I always ask my self "what is my kid going to explore? My Spotify account?" It's one of the reasons I still collect vinyls and books. Even if I don't really listen or read them from the physical format.
Yes, and that provides a valuable lesson to a child. Everything about vinyl is a lesson, from "how does this make sound" to "what are the pops and hiss" to scratching it and hearing the results. Digital media also has lessons, but my preference is to teach a child the basics before introducing them to the complexities of digital media.
I built ours with the RFID Jukebox and wrote a little tool called labelmaker to print labels for audio books and music: https://pilabor.com/projects/labelmaker/, but in the end it took too much time to print so many labels :-)
I recently bought the toniebox to hack it for my son's 4th birthday. It has become his favorite object.
I considered building sometime custom, but the tonie hardware is cute, portable, and lovable in a way that would be hard to replicate.
It has been really fun for my wife and I to listen to our favorite music in the car, and then when my son says "I like this song" I "burn" him a little disk that evening.
He's turned into a little DJ, and has memorized a handful of his songs (and dances and sings along).
One caveat is that finding compatible NFC tags is a little bit complicated. if you buy from RFIDfriend [0] then they take a couple weeks to arrive from Germany.
We have Yoto for our kids and I was initially skeptical (the cards are quite expensive) but actually it's been amazing. Probably the biggest benefit that we didn't even know is that they have a sort of radio/podcast thing for kids called Yoto Daily that's really well produced and totally free.
I love this! I prefer digital stuff (less things to worry about), but I miss the physicality, especially when friends come over. Books or CDs become a conversation.
If you'd like to do something similar, but don't want to DIY it, check out Yoto Player [1]. This is a small music speaker and they sell a bunch of NFC cards to "play" them. You can also buy blank cards and use their app to add whatever you want to them (music, audiobooks, even audio recordings). It's really well made.
There are a bunch of other companies with similar products. Some use miniatures instead of NFC cards. If you search the web for NFC music player, there are a few FOSS apps on github so you can focus on the hardware part and use their software on a raspberry pi.
This is also great for elders.
P.S.: if you fancy a cool project, I'd love to see someone reverse engineering Yoto so it gets the audio from a local server instead. This way we can use their great hardware, but can use any NFC cards.
I pulled apart my Yoto mini! I found an unencrypted ESP32, and managed to pull the firmware off it too.
My reverse engineering skills are limited, so my journey has paused there for now, but I would _love_ to be able to map out all the hardware & write open source firmware for it.
The Yoto set up is very smart (the NFC cards hold a Yoto URL, which responds with a JSON document describing the music & links to MP3s on S3, or m3u files for internet radio).
The only downside is that the Yoto will _only_ follow what I presume are allow-listed URLs, and has SSL certs for those URLs baked in, so if the company ever goes under the devices would lose almost all functionality, without new firmware.
I want to support Yoto as these devices are really great, but I’d also love to be able to drop my own URLs on cards and:
- Play tracks from Plex like OP
- Trigger lighting/mood changes with HomeAssistant as well as play an album
- Play the music on network speakers (eg. Sonos), using the Yoto as the source
If anyone feels like they’d be interested in helping reverse engineer them, do reply!
> especially when friends come over. Books or CDs become a conversation.
There's nothing worse than when having people over, and sitting in front of a computer or device isolating from the group. The physical medium of vinyl albums or even CDs allow interaction with everyone instead of someone just clicking on a screen some where. What I read on an album covers might not be the same thing you read and take away from it. It just makes music sharing so much more personal.
Yeah, yoto works really nice for the same purpose. My kid's got lots of custom music on the blanks now. Both soundtracks from movies and custom playlists. I suspect it's going to transform into more of albums in the next years. Whether purchased or DIY, it's also a great solution to giving agency to a 3yo without something like "have an ipad with the whole spotify".
Agree. I have a 2.5yo girl at home, who loves songs at the moment. Before that, I was wondering if there is a way to give her some experience like playing albums, but not just the sound. Now I have found the way. (and we have a 3D printer)
CDs are now actually also joining vinyls in being revived for physical merch purposes. They're no longer needed, but if you want them they are available for purchase.
Not that it'll happen, or at least I haven't heard of it, but I'd love for MiniDiscs to also make a comeback (not that they ever were that popular), and see new releases in that format. It's my favorite one, a nice blend of CDs and compact cassettes (no worries about scratches thanks to the protective shell, even when you carelessly throw the discs in your pockets).
After years of digital only I started buying CDs and books again. I am much more selective though. Just buy what I will listen to many times or for artist support.
Bought a total of 3 CDs in two years. Movies are more difficult, as I can't stand watching most the second time. Got some Ghibli classics.
My sister showed it to me at a holiday house where we had no internet. I thought it was awesome, an offline music/audio player that her daughter could use. She mentioned you could make your own cards. It immediately reminded me of making mix tape cassettes and cds as a child.
I bought one the next week without doing any further research.
When it arrived and asked me to connect it to the wifi I was very confused.
I realised I made a massive assumption that “someone had solved the NFC card memory capacity problem”. I’d seen it work without internet and made all these assumptions about how it worked.
Obviously wrong in hindsight.
Still a great piece of kit, but I’d love something that was more akin to a cassette players rec/play/rewind/rec &
Physical medium.
They’re a fantastic piece of kit! They have a Micro SD card internally and download the album/card on first use, then it can be used fully offline any time in the future. It’s a great trade off in my mind (though I’ll post one level up about how I wish it’d do even better here…)
There is a technical difference though - yolo keeps the audio on the cards, while this project uses NFC tags to select locally stored audio. To have truly collectable experience, yolo type of thing is the only choice.
Yoto doesn’t keep the audio on the cards, all the audio is stored on the cloud and the NFC cards just have a link to the album. The Yoto can’t play a card it hasn’t already seen before without connecting to the Wi-Fi and downloading it.
I think mentioned elsewhere here, https://github.com/MiczFlor/RPi-Jukebox-RFID is great for this. I did something similar with an opp shop Fisher Price[0] record player, with the RFID reader under the turntable and each 'card' is a laminated record cover with the rfid stuck on it. Lots of good photos of different implementations in their issue threads.
We also use it for kids podcasts (autodownloads them weekly). I added a TTS script that generates a friendly audio message from a text file that can be triggered to play from an alarm or for a specific record. This announces the weather with a Dad joke at the end. I tried to automate the last one with various sources (db, LLM, etc - but felt too cold, so I just dictate it to the server from the phone) and usually add a customised message about our family calendar (wear a jacket for rain. cousins are coming today).
Yeah I've also build a Phoniebox a couple of years ago for my kid. It has physical buttons, RFID cards or chips (some hidden in plush toys) and works very much like tonies, but with much easier access to anything you want to put on it. It's all in a wooden box including speakers. I've later extended it with a powerbank.
Luckily I never got rid of my old CDs. They have been sitting in a cabinet for decades and last Xmas I got my son a portable CD player for $35. They have been exploring all kinds of my old music, which is awesome.
I see it in your photos here - Dookie by Green Day is a big hit with my boys!
> Kids nowadays just take for granted music and it makes me kinda sad.
Maybe it's better to say they take their easy access to music for granted, which I think is okay. Isn't it better than not having access - or having very very limited access - because they're also broke teenagers?
I've done something similar, for myself. I have a Tangara [1], which despite being quirky and expensive, I really love. It has an SD card slot, and while SD cards aren't as cheap as NFC tags, you can get hundreds from AliExpress for $1 each. I put one or two albums or a short mixtape on each one, and make a label for it myself. I don't use streaming services anyway, but now, instead of having music on my phone, I have a big box of SD cards I can physically arrange, choose from, and take with me. It also means that notification sounds never intrude on my listening experience.
Nice project! Reminds me of a startup whom I met the founders several years ago: they had a system of hexagonal wooden tiles you could put on a device to play a specific songs (also maybe videos). I'm not sure the project is still alive but I found an article with pictures of what I saw: https://competition.adesignaward.com/ada-winner-design.php?I...
While digital files are obviously very practical and efficient for our pictures/audio/video I can't help but see how different our relationship to them is when a physical object embodies the data.
I love this, and so many good projects mentioned in the comments too. My son just turned three and we still have a real CD player that we use, sometimes, but now often it's streaming from Spotify or NAS. I was just thinking about how to do something similar, thanks for the inspiration ♥
I really like the idea. I also grew up in a household with tons of physical media to explore. I still have my blue ray collection but it’s mainly sitting in the shelf because I honestly don’t know what else to put there.
But I’m wondering reading all the comments from people doing something similar with alternative products etc how they do this legally? I mean I can’t just download stuff from Apple Music and play it offline on some random player. Same with most other streaming providers. Or are you accepting the greyzone here by saying you pay for the service so it doesn’t matter? Or are you happily buying all the content on some other medium / drm free stores to put them on these alternatives players? I specifically mean solutions where one needs some form of copy of the files.
I use Apple Music and have made a very similar setup to the article. Instead of the NFC pointing to a Plex URL, I have it trigger an Automation to play the relevant album on Apple Music. Works well, plays instantly, feels magical, and most of all it's got rid of the 'what should I listen to' friction so I now find my home is filled with music way more often. Downside of this approach is it only works on my own phone.
Yes I know. But audiobooks bought are way more expensive than getting them from audible with the credit system over the course of one year for instance.
I used to buy my albums rather than having a streaming service subscription. But I sadly caved in. I just wonder if all who report they do this for they kids etc really go out and buy all these great records and audiobooks etc. because for me there is a reason to have a subscription. An album on iTunes costs roughly 10€. For that I can listen a whole month to whatever album. Sure the album is somewhat mine when I purchase it (definitely when bought on a physical medium).
At the moment I purchase my favorite movies digital even though I could watch them on Netflix and co.
It seems to me like this is more about nostalgia than current music. I'm considering doing something similar with my cd collection which is original from the 90s/00s with some back catalogue 60s-90s stuff thrown in. I listen to most modern music via streaming, but still buy the odd new release album that really matters to me (literally one or two a year).
I’ve ripped a bunch of cds which I think is not technically legal here but I have no moral issue, an we’d bought some.
Other than that with setups like music assistant you can stream from these services, it’s just a different trigger. I know that’s not quite what you asked but it’s a clean solution to play on the speakers you’d already stream on.
Well because at least from a German perspective one can get in lots of troubles when going the non legal way. Of course the question is how you do it etc etc. my question was if in fact people go the greyzone or start to purchase from alternative sources instead of using streaming services.
When similar topics come up I like to add this tidbit, also encourage them to listen to full albums. In order, no shuffle or playlist, just dedicating an ~hour to sit and listen to an album.
When any Dookie song ends I still automatically start singing or air strumming the next track on the album.
I feel something the same but actually feel the CD and records generations missed out on a lot as well, not that music was a formless thing but that it was disembodied, appearing from plastic discs and dumb speakers.
With my daughter I'm trying to just have much more music in the house, instruments laying around, singing and teaching her traditional songs and making them up together. I don't really worry about her not sitting around choosing between the Stones or the Beatles, as long as she's developing her own relationship with music.
The next phase of this process is that generations which will experience music telepathically will be extremely nostalgic for music perceived by means of vibrating the air in the living room.
I did a similar project... <checks date of yt video... oh my I'm old> 13 years ago. I haven't used it in some time, but I really do miss the visual aspect of selecting what to listen to... you've inspired me to get it rigged up again. Thanks.
My hacky solution, which is obviously way out of date and a bit specialised to my situation (in that I use kodi to play my music) is over here: https://github.com/Fuzzwah/xbmc-rfid-music
Awesome album picks. Odelay looks especially great on your card.
I made something like this for TV shows and movies using floppy disks. Each floppy has a text file with filepaths of videos on a hard drive. When the floppy is inserted a bash script detects it and plays a random video from the text file on the floppy.
I like the physicality of systems like this. It is much more satisfying to to flick through physical items than to scroll through a digital list of things.
You've got great artwork. I need to up the artwork on my floppys!
Like many others, I also built my own version: a raspberry pi with an NFC tag reader would map the ID to a spotify url to play the album on my google voice assistant.
The fun part about mine is that I slapped the tags to mini vynil coasters, and made a casing that looked like a mini vynil player, so it looks pretty cute. And you can browse your minivynils physically like you would with real records, which was the experience I was after.
This is really nice! I also feel that the same way about how music, and especially the concept of an album, has lost its value in times of streaming due to giving up ownership, having access to everything, over-using playlists, and the absence of the visual art (i.e. packaging/booklet/liner notes) that used to accompany albums (and also compilations/EPs/single releases) when they were still physical entities.
A few years ago I made Zipped Album [1] as an attempt to solve this purely in the software domain by slightly changing the way we store and consume digitally owned (i.e. bought and downloaded vs. streamed) music. It contains a proposal for a simple single-file music album format that incorporates visual art [2], and an example cross-platform player for it that (hopefully) demonstrates how this can promote a more (inter)active/conscious listening experience [3].
It's this gorgeous mixing of innovation and nostalgia. I love how you tied the haptic joy of finding music with modern tech the NFC + PlexAmp partnership. It's amazing how streaming gave music to everyone's fingertips but reduced it to something less personal, and your solution restores that sense of ownership and ritual.
I'd love to see this be a bit of an open source kit or community project I suspect lots of parents and music nerds would leap at it.
We have a Yoto, too. We got it for my three-year-old and he listens to pretty often. My 1-year-old found it recently and I'm surprised at how much he likes engaging with it, too.
Yeah. We love our Yoto but I also can’t hook up Spotify streaming to Yoto cards, so this post is a very inspired way to bring back the “purpose” behind collecting the music.
I think a workaround to the Spotify issue with Yoto would be proxying a Spotify account through a raspberry pi or lightweight cloud vm. The Yoto cards themselves point to playlists in yoto’s cloud, and the playlists can link to files or stream URIs.
You can use bulk nfc cards from China. I got like 50 cards for five bucks or so. Taking them into use is a bit more laborious (you have to record an official card first and then duplicate the tag to a bulk card), but considering the price is a no brainer.
Your project is super cool and really well executed. Thanks for sharing. I’ve had success with cheap blank NFC cards instead of the official MyYo York cards. I have a quick breakdown in my recent comment history if you’re curious.
Love this project! That line about unintentionally teaching kids to consume music passively really resonates. I built something with a similar motivation – Muky (https://muky.app), an app for creating curated, distraction-free music experiences for kids. Different approach (digital vs. physical), but the same core idea: helping kids engage with music intentionally rather than as background noise.
I've never been super into music listening, though I do love singing. I'm curious what you think is important about this difference in approach. The idea doesn't come naturally to me - probably for the same reason intentional listening sounds more like a chore to me.
I want to be clear I'm not poo-pooing on the idea! I just can't connect with it personally, and if you're that into the topic, I figured you might have good insight into this idea, at least from a personal perspective :)
For me it's just a matter of being able to follow what's going on. It would be like watching a movie passively or listening to someone read from a book without listening to what they're saying.
Muky looks awesome for younger kids. The integration with Spotify seems really well thought out, and I like the 'iOS 16' feature!
I'm not in the target market for this, but I've heard other parents wish for a way to curate their kids' YouTube experience. For example restricting them to certain pre-approved channels. I wonder if there's a clever way to do that with a companion app, like you've done with Muky/Spotify.
I deeply resonate with this kind of physically interactive digital medium, some that immediatly came to my mind:
1. DIY live photo with Instax and tape that can be played in Califone Cardmaster (I've seen this in a Chinese video, you can search a lot of similar guides on YouTube)
We grew up before smartphones were ubiquitous, our digital experiences were tied to physical media. Cameras had film, Walkmans had tapes, VCD players had discs, and game consoles had cartridges. These objects are deeply embedded in our childhood memories, so seeing them today brings an inevitable wave of nostalgia and joy.
But it's more than just nostalgia. There's a tactile pleasure and a sense of accomplishment in using these physical items that a smartphone can't quite replicate. While phones offer immense convenience through countless apps, they also abstract away many opportunities for exploration and direct interaction with the physical world.
That's why, no matter how advanced our devices become—even if we one day have brain-computer interfaces—I want to preserve a culture of playing with and collecting tangible objects for myself and the next generation. My son currently uses a reading pen for his storybooks at bedtime. In the future, I plan to make him physical "launch cards" for music albums and games. These things serve as anchors, keeping us connected to the real world and preventing us from becoming completely immersed in cyberspace.
> I think we're unintentionally teaching our children to consume music passively. My goal with this project was to teach them to discover it actively, to own it, to care about it at the album level. I think it kinda worked!
Some people also say that about prerecorded music and whine about when families had to gather around the piano to sing.
My three-year-old and I listen to music together, and he (sometimes) really engages with what he is hearing. He'll pick out the words and ask about what different phrases mean. I'll say who the singer or band it, what genre it is, and instrument is playing, etc. Or I'll turn it around and ask stuff like "do you want to listen to jazz, or bluegrass, or classical musical?" He's developing a pretty good ear, I think! And, of course, sometimes we gotta dance.
No. I'm paraphrasing a comment from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Liberalism_Failed. (A very important book no matter what part of the political spectrum you are on; even if you disagree with the author's opinions. See Obama's quote in the above link.) The author is the kind of conservative who values a family getting together and singing.
Basically, my point is that the attitude of phrases like "unintentionally teaching our children to consume music passively" always forget that the thing we're criticizing had the same criticisms in the past. IE, the whole concept of prerecorded music taught our parents and grandparents to consume music passively.
Very nice! I built a similar system with my young kids a few years ago called Qrocodile [1], which used a RPi (inside a custom Lego model) to control our Sonos system by reading QR codes printed on small cards. QR worked well because they're cheap to print. We printed a couple hundred album/song cards (each with album art) and a number of control cards. Fun project. Source code and all the instructions (for server, client, and card generator) are in the GitHub project [2].
I remember going to the flea market with my dad discovering new music by buying old vinyl records just by liking the cover art or because I've vaguely heard about the band. How times have changed even though t=ose flea markets with records still exist today.
I've been thinking about the same, but use old cassette tapess and just print a small QR code on the back, then rip out the intestines on an old cassette player and put in a raspi and camera to read the QR and play the equivalent song/album.
On one hand, I love the possibility of having millions of albums at your disposal via streaming services. On the other hand, I hate having to type or click to select them (voice recognition just doesn't work).
This could also be a way for social discovery that studios could promote:
Imagine a rack of album cards at Target where each costs a $1 and lets you play samples of all the tracks on the album (read lyrics and liner notes, etc) and puts $1 in your online wallet. So, kids (or anyone) could sample different albums and then save up to buy whole albums they like. Also, already redeemed ("used") cards would still play samples so kids could share/trade them as a way to say "check this music out!"
Can you imagine Billboard charts of Top Album Cards (Sampled and Bought) which would be so much more impactful than a lame count of streams or whatever. The charts would represent music kids are actually trading and talking about.
Nice project, but It's interesting how differently one's formative experiences makes this subject seem.
As someone who grew up in a household in a small village, brought up by parents whose music collection was 99% classical music and who actively fought the influence of modern/US-centric culture, and with limited personal money (a typical album would have been ~1.5 month's pocket money) the current world of Youtube, Spotify, et al is a utopia.
I wish I'd had the problem of infinitely available music. :)
If your inkjet printer has the right tray, you can buy printable CD-Rs for about 25 cents a piece in bulk. And somewhat unrelated, I've also been printing out a lot more of the photos I take.
I got a Canon PRO-100 printer for $25 off of Facebook marketplace, they practically gave them away with higher end DSLRs so they're easy to get second hand, and a set of generic ink cartridges is about $15. With generic ink and generic photo paper, you can do a 13x19 prints for about 50 cents each. It's not archival grade printing, but it's pretty good and affordable.
My friend's slightly less geeky approach was just to rebuy a lot of his classic albums on CD that he'd previously sold, which his daughters seem to enjoy at about half the age of the one in the story.
Possibly bossing their dad around to do the actual disc insertion is part of the fun at that age.
As someone who borrows books from the library rather than buys them (partly as an added motivation to actually read them within a set timeframe) I have similar thoughts about my bookshelves that mostly contain gifted books.
It's an interesting toy, but I wonder if this isn't someone trying to hold back the tides of modernity by making their kids appreciate music the way they did.
AFAICT most of the old musical tribes we used to arrange ourselves into are a bit of a thing of the past (punks/goths/greebos/grunge/indie kids/ravers/etc), and kids don't build their identities around music taste any more, because music is no longer so much of a scarce commodity.
Sometimes things just change...
That said, as a fun tech project, definitely cool.
Sorry I didn’t mean to come across as overly critical, and connecting with your kids is always a worthwhile activity. They certainly look like they’re having fun!
I’m just wondering out loud if people aren’t sometimes teaching their kids things that they did, but aren’t really a thing in the modern world. Maybe you’re doing them a huge favour! Certainly there is a large movement to appreciate albums again, rather than consume streams, and showing them it’s good to be interested in what the music is and who made it is no bad thing.
Love this. What are you tapping the cards onto? What is reading that info and then pulling the music? (I'm not super savvy and can't figure it out from the writeup).
On iPhone, tapping an NFC tag with a URL opens a popup that allows you to navigate to that URL with a single click. If this URL is supported by an installed app, this app will handle this. For example, if you write a URL of a Spotify playlist onto your NFC tag/sticker (which you can also do from the phone via an app like NFC Tools), then bring that sticker to iPhone, it will show this as a Spotify URL, and you can tap on this notification and go to that Spotify playlist. So all you need to experiment with is a writable NFC tag and your phone, no other hardware required. I bet Android phones offer a similar experience.
that’s the right question! i’m surprised no one has asked it yet. part 2 will be all about setting up the raspberry pi with an nfc hat and a ‘read-only’ display as the tap target.
Thank you! If his friends shared music with him, I'd be a happy dad. I just don't see any of them hooked like I was. It's more "single of the week" with them.
I love this. I have had a similar project on my todo list for about a decade. My intent was to just use album art image recognition though. That way you could queue up streaming service music using actual physical media or using printed card facsimiles which would be even more accessible without the need to include NFC.
I’ve made a conscious decision to not do streaming services. Having all the music is not much different than having no music at all. I don’t even want all of my own music on my phone. Instead, I use a set of smart playlists to give me a changing selection of songs based on ratings, how long it’s been since I last heard a song and how new the music is in my library.
> Having all the music is not much different than having no music at all.
This is an interesting statement; could you clarify what you mean? Taken at face value it seems like a falsism, but I'm assuming you have an interpretation in mind that would make sense to me.
It’s really just the idea that having a collection of music that I’ve curated through my own tastes means that I can safely do things like just tell my phone to shuffle all songs and I’ll be happy with what plays. Jason Kottke recently posted the kind of hacky thing he put together to be able to get music he likes playing through a web-based player that manages to combine all the various streaming sources where he gets his music and it seemed really sad that he had to do all that work while I can use my phone/itunes¹ in exactly the same way I did 17 years ago.
⸻
1. Yes it’s now just called “Music” but because “Apple Music” (intentionally, I think) confusingly refers to both the streaming service and the app I use to manage my digital music collection and because damnit, I’m the kind of old person from Chicago who still calls it the Sears Tower/Standard Oil Building/Northwestern Station/Comiskey/etc., I’m gonna still call it iTunes.
It's like having a library you built up over the years based on your tastes and the era you grew up in that you can idly look through vs having a search bar to YouTube.
I hear the same argument a lot when it comes to game emulation. People will say you shouldn't put full ROM sets on your device because it makes it harder to decide what to play and to stick to a game. Compare that to browsing the 30 GameCube games you have in a cupboard from 20 years ago. You can kinda recreate that digitally by only putting a select amount of games on your device at a time and trying to spend more time per game. This particularly comes up when discussing emulation on handhelds.
Bringing the conversation back to music, while I do prefer digital, I've got albums in FLAC on my phone and I re-listen to the same 50 or so albums a lot, only occasionally adding/removing from what's on there.
Not op, but to me this resonates because none of it is “mine”, none of it exists in the real world. There’s a huge difference between the music I physically collected (from libraries, friends, Best Buy, Christmas gifts, used cd stores) and uploaded into my iPod and lived with for years vs music I searched on a whim, listened to for a month while it was in my “recents” and then eventually forgot about once it was pushed out by something else.
There are two big offers with streaming services: catalogue and curation (playlists, up next).
On curation, taking one's time to do that oneself is arguably superior. You get to know your music better, tailor the collection to your tastes, discovery and growth is active not passive.
If you're really into a band or genre you'll also run into the limits of Spotify's collection. Artists have missing albums, some artists aren't there at all. It's not as bad as film and TV, where six subs are required to cover a broad range of viewing, but that's the enshittification pathway.
I've been meaning to build a similar thing. I already have all the parts, but I was hoping to find a way to build something that simulated a small record player. Bonus points for a way to have a functioning turntable with the NFC reader + raspi hidden underneath it. If anyone has ideas or has seen a way to make that work please share some links!
I built a scanner with a nfc reader and esphome, and I made some 3d printed things to stick the tags on - the kids love them. I originally partly did this as not all songs play well when asked for on a smart speaker. I know all these are safe and I can put playlists on them too.
I like this idea. While it’s great to have all the music at my fingertips via Alexa + Apple Music (or Spotify etc), it’s actually not very conducive to browsing or recalling all the music and albums I like.
Something physical to browse like this is a pretty fun way to marry the physical world with digital music catalogs.
I built https://dailyalbum.art/ to solve a part of the browsing problem you're talking about. Nothing physical I'm afraid, but I do really love this RFID tap to play idea!
I've curated a list of 500+ critically acclaimed albums, which I continue to add to as the Mercury Prize nominees are announced each year, Rough Trade releases its albums of the year, etc.
It picks 12 a day and that's that; it's the same 12 for everyone. If you see something familiar, you might want to go for that. Or if you're in the mood for something new & different, you can give something unknown a try.
Nice timing. I’m right in the middle of doing this for music and video media for my kid (using an elaborate concoction of python, nocodb, home assistant, Jellyfin, a NAS, an RPi, and a chromecast) and the thing I had yet to figure out was the physicality of the RFID-sticker-containing cards themselves
I love this! Not just because I also grew up in the 90ies and like your music choice :)
As we drown in media and slop, I think it's super important to teach kids how to be selective, develop taste. And I too found that physical connection does help with that.
Great project and execution. It would be great if you could also introduce a social aspect, i.e. kids sharing/swapping cards.
This reminds me of the present I came up with for a mate's 40th.
I ran up a bunch of playlists on Spotify, pulled them down with spotdl, burned them to CDs, ran up some album art, and slapped QR codes linking to the playlists on the back. Was super fun.
First of all, this is super super cool. I love these cards, and how he's doing this for his son.
But it also makes me sad when people write things like:
> My 10-year-old doesn't have that. Music just sort of... happens. It's like it's infinite and invisible at the same time, playing from smart speakers, car stereos, my phone. Endless perfectly curated playlists, designed to fade into the background. The default listening experience has become both literally and figuratively formless.
That doesn't match my experience with Spotify, for example. By using things like related artists and radio stations based on an obscure track I've discovered, I've been able to become far more intentional about my listening and discover far more music than I ever could when I was younger.
And music that "happens" and "fades into the background" isn't anything new. That's what analog radio has been for as long as most of us have been alive. Only with far, far, far less choice.
So I love this project -- aesthetically it's super cool and it demonstrates a lot of love. I just wish the author wasn't trying to paint this narrative that the "default listening experience" is somehow getting worse. It's not. It's better than it's ever been.
I don't agree, endless music from faceless artists have made everything weightless and interchangeable, the never ending stream of recommended artists means that clicking next is more exciting than actually listening to something.
I remember 15-20 years ago, every album (even digital album) meant something, I remember trading CDs and MP3s with friends and listening to an album (or even a song) over and over again. Now we're spoiled for choice and very, very few artists produce something that will be remembered in 10 years, let alone 5.
I feel like you're describing some strange alternate universe. I genuinely don't understand what you're talking about.
Faceless artists? Artists have dedicated followings with fanbases where they interact more than ever before. Weightless and interchangeable? Artist's personalities are more distinct and individual than ever.
You think people don't listen to albums anymore? That they're "clicking next" rather than listening? Do you actually know anybody who likes music? I think you might not actually be in touch with today's music scene.
> Faceless artists? Artists have dedicated followings with fanbases where they interact more than ever before.
Not so much these days. Especially on streaming platforms where countless tracks that get pushed on listeners are recorded by anonymous session musicians whose works are sometimes put out under an assigned name for that singe track, then they get assigned a new name for the next track they put out. Even worse, a lot of music on Spotify and Apple Music are 100% AI generated tracks. Literally faceless.
> You think people don't listen to albums anymore? That they're "clicking next" rather than listening?
Many aren't even "clicking next". They're just taking whatever comes next over their speakers and letting their streaming platform decide for them what they're hearing.
Of course faceless artists exist if that's what you're actively seeking. And sure some people are putting on AI-generated tracks in the background while they study or whatever.
But that's not representative. Regular people who like regular real-life artists continue to listen to them, the same as they always have.
And I don't know anybody who outsources their music tastes entirely to e.g. Spotify. Like, you have to actually pick a playlist or something. You have to make some choice. And like I said, people have been "just taking whatever comes next over their speakers" by listening to the radio for many, many decades.
You're commenting as if something has changed for the worse in the past 15-20 years. It hasn't. It's only gotten better in terms of real music. And if you don't like the AI slop, don't listen to it.
> And like I said, people have been "just taking whatever comes next over their speakers" by listening to the radio for many, many decades.
Radio never had a daily/hourly limit on how many times you could change the station. Radio wasn't filled with AI generated music either. Every song you heard on radio was performed by an actual human. If you liked what you heard you could see the bands in concert. Even acts like milli vanilli were better than scams like The Velvet Sundown (https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/tim-boucher-velvet-sun...)
Certainly people continue to exist who like listening to music made by real bands, but increasingly people are listening to AI generated music that is anything but distinct and individual.
The music landscape and the way music is experienced is vastly different from how it was back in the days of radio and CDs and yeah, I suspect that much of this change is for the worse.
Everything good in the AI generated music getting millions of streams came from humans whose talent and creativity were used in training the AI. If real artists increasingly have trouble getting discovered and building fans because their efforts are lost in a growing sea of AI slop that will be bad for artists and there will be less good music being made for AI to take and regurgitate back at listeners. AI will increasingly have to feed off of it's own slop and its hard to imagine that being ideal for music lovers either.
> I suspect that much of this change is for the worse.
I think you're just not aware of so many things that have changed for the better. So much better.
I just can't get worked up about AI slop music. It's not taking over. It's the easiest thing in the world to avoid.
Today, new artists can get started in SoundCloud and YouTube without label gatekeepers. They're not constrained by top 40 tastes. They can communicate directly with fans. They get discovered on people's curated playlists as well as custom "radio" stations.
Music is in a better place than it's ever been before. I'm sorry you seem to only focus on small negatives, without seeing the massive positive shifts.
I get the feeling you're not actually into music yourself, and you're just talking about news reports you've read. Because if you were really engaging with artists today, I don't understand how you could be writing the things you are.
The other thing that has happened over the past 15-20 years is that you've aged as much, though.
I remember being very excited about my favorite band releasing a new record when I was a teenager. Not that I don't enjoy that today at all, but I feel like the difference can be explained by my having heard dozens of more great albums since then much better than by the shift from physical to virtual media.
Looking at today's teenagers, I am not concerned about them not appreciating individual songs and artists enough. (If anything, I'd argue the opposite!)
Children today can be as conscious music listeners as we, who collected and sought out music of our own in our youth in the 80' and 90'. Or as unfastidious as those listening to top chart hits exclusively (including both Mike Oldfield and Milli Vanilli, whichever is in the top) in our childhood.
Two, possibly related anocdote.
My goddaughter is 12. She is in a revolting phase where difficult to find way to her heart. But we are on the same wavelength and can engage in hours and hours of excited conversation (we are 40 years apart btw.) about music beacuse she listens to those I listened when I was in her age or more. "Today's music sucks", she argues, and we share playlists. Actually I am able to show her those do not suck today but rarely found because you have to broese similar atrists of a similar artist from somthing you found by accident as a background music of a movie. These kind of discovery through huge music databases is great! About the same good as being lost in a huge vinyl/cd shop. You cannot touch, but you can listen!
Another is just interesting, and a reflection to the "todays music suck" kind of oversimplification. But also to how young people can discover their own music. Once in Germany waiting for a tram a loud group of graduating high school student like figures came by shouting the refrain of '99 Luftbalons' while it was playing from an uncomfortably loud boombox. I could not stop smiling thinking of them. : )
You're absolutely right. As a teen, I could only really listen to what my small income could afford. And CDs were expensive! It definitely made you savour that one CD that you could afford every month, but I'm not sure that is the superior experience.
My teen daughter has an incredible range of music taste and strong opinions about her favourite bands, much more than I was a teen. And I've watched this evolve since she was much younger. She has playlists with her favourite artists and she's constantly sharing with me, and asking me to go to concerts with her. All of that is through Spotify/Youtube music.
Yeah. I would want a father that is supporting and open to the changes of modern times. Not one that romantisises the past and pities the future.
But there have always been people who think the time they lived in were superior and the youth will be a lost generation with whatever is lost to progress.
Hmm w/o using Plex, I think the same can be done using a RasPi w/ an NFC reader to send a command to a remote MPD server to start casting to my Google Home devices. The NFC tag to album mapping can be managed using a plaintext file.
What's your approach to expanding his collection - do you add cards based on what he gravitates toward, or do you intentionally introduce "bridge" artists to expand his palette?
Im not OP but i have a player for my kids which is basically the same. I do both. Sometimes I introduce songs and we talk about it, other times they hear something somewhere and ask me for it.
There is a similar children's toy called Yoto that uses cards to load stories and songs on a player. I love the idea of hacking something together, this is really cool !
I started thinking about how to build this at one point but never got around to it. i've thought about doing this with QR code stickers, but the NFC approach might be nicer.
What's easy about vinyl? If you want a kid to have a physical copies of music, then CDs generally cost between a third and a tenth the price of the vinyl equivalent and are far more "kid friendly" - not just the CDs themselves but the playback equipment. Unless you want to have them listen on one of those novelty mass produced plastic turntables that sound absolutely terrible, a good stylus on a decent turntable is just a kid's innocent bump away from destruction.
Because you can see a lot of the moving parts and get involved in the actual reproduction of the sound by playing with the stylus, touching the record, slowing it down, speeding it up...
Anyway, used vinyl is a lot more fun, and cheaper. Most of my collection was in the $2-4 range in the early 2000s.
We have a record player and some vinyl records in the house. My three-year-old is starting to like them. Today, he even was holding the record carefully by the sides. Made me such a proud dad, haha.
My 1-year-old, however is pretty monstrous to the records. We have some little kid vinyl that I got for cheap off a friend, and we placed those within his reach. He thinks they're interesting, but grabs the record or sleeve and bends them a lot. It's whatever, it's fine. But I did make it a point recently to move my favorite records to another room for the time being :)
This has to be one of the coolest, near zero cost projects I've seen in a while. KUDOS to the author for the simplicity and creativity found on those cards!
I loved flipping through LPs at the record store and would usually go through everything at my favorite stores. The flap-flap-flap of the cardboard sleeves was so soothing.
Writable NFC cards are pretty cheap on Aliexpress and Amazon, they're writable with most any NFC enabled phone and apps like "NFC Tools" that let you input a uri.
If you don't have a Plex server like the OP, you could use a link to the streaming service you use.
Without getting too fancy with the tech, I found a 10 pack of 128MB micro SD cards on Amazon for $15. Those seem like they'd be slim enough for an off-the-shelf option to hack something together for $1.50 per album, if you're not worried about having audiophile quality.
Meh I feel like this sort of misses the point. It's very cool technically but if the aim is to bring back a sense of connection to music then I'd say the execution is way off.
Music stores are struggling, if they go all that'll be left is Amazon and Spotify...
Here's my tip. Buy your kid a CD walkman, go to a music store once a month and give them a budget. If they're lost help them get started. If they make a choice they don't like then most stores will offer trade in. Eventually they'll even form a relationship with the store workers (shout at to Mark in Truck) who will give more recommendations. My son's even started listening to radio to get more inspiration and we pumped all of our money into the local economy...
I had a huge music collection of everything from thrash and death metal to new age and 80s. I don’t miss those days at all. I can’t tell you how many times I bought cds for one song and the rest of thing was garbage. When you’re a teen without a job or working to pay things like car insurance, gas etc, that 17 bucks was precious. No record store would let you return shit albums where I live.
Now I have all the music I’ll ever want for a low monthly fee, and I’ve discovered genres I would have never splurged for because of the limited resources I had at the time. My son does tons of music discovery through Spotify that I could have never done and doesn’t have to plop down 17 bucks for only 12-13 songs, 11-12 of which might be utter garbage.
I mean that's super cool, but faced with the same problem I just bought a second hand Sony CD player off ebay and lots of discs, people sell them for nothing because no one wants a collection of CDs anymore.
Seems like an excuse to play with NFC tags. These types of articles come off as sanctimonious. There is nothing superior about the cards. On a phone or computer you can get complete liner notes for any song. All of that is missing from this system. You don't need to justify working on a pet project. Just do it. It doesn't have to be "superior". It's ok if it's dumb.
I was surprised to see nothing about liner notes, lyrics, or other info that could have been added to these cards. Especially with the aspect ratio issue! Seems like almost anything would be a better use of that valuable space than AI hallucinations.
Thank you for your wonderfully misguided attack on me. Is naming me supposed to be intimidating? I made a comment on the material features of the project and not the creator. I hope you find joy. I recommend you spend some time outdoors and learn to appreciate the beauty in life. Foster a life of gratitude.
It is a bit of a humblebrag, like many parenting articles, but it's nice that he made something for his kid even if it basically an effort to pass on his own musical taste rather than investigate what cool new things are happening below the marketing radar of today's industry. I do wonder if it might not have been more involving to just get hold of an old record/cassette player and take the kid to the nearest used music store, but hey.
You are in my mind and in my heart. This is a constant thought that I have. I grew up in a house where books, vinyls, cds, slides, tapes and other media were everywhere. Some on display, others archived in boxes. Large part of my childhood was spent with me exploring through that stuff and creating custom mixtapes with songs that I really liked. I still have a lot of them.
I also remember my 10 yo self, designing in Corel draw my own labels and printing them to fit the tape case.
I always ask my self "what is my kid going to explore? My Spotify account?" It's one of the reasons I still collect vinyls and books. Even if I don't really listen or read them from the physical format.
I’d like to think someone in future would read my kindle books and see the notes I’ve made on certain paragraphs.
That would be possible in a sane world, but in this world, we have DRM
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Vinyl records are easily damaged.
A CD collection would be fine, and depending on the genre might be available fairly cheaply second hand, or could be recorded onto CD-R.
>Vinyl records are easily damaged.
Yes, and that provides a valuable lesson to a child. Everything about vinyl is a lesson, from "how does this make sound" to "what are the pops and hiss" to scratching it and hearing the results. Digital media also has lessons, but my preference is to teach a child the basics before introducing them to the complexities of digital media.
Claim to have? That’s an oddly skeptical phrasing.
There are several projects here in germany doing similar things.
There is https://tonies.com, which is cloud based and pretty expensive, but hackable (https://github.com/toniebox-reverse-engineering/teddycloud).
Then there is the RFID Jukebox: https://github.com/MiczFlor/RPi-Jukebox-RFID
And Tonuino: https://github.com/tonuino/TonUINO-TNG
I built ours with the RFID Jukebox and wrote a little tool called labelmaker to print labels for audio books and music: https://pilabor.com/projects/labelmaker/, but in the end it took too much time to print so many labels :-)
I recently bought the toniebox to hack it for my son's 4th birthday. It has become his favorite object.
I considered building sometime custom, but the tonie hardware is cute, portable, and lovable in a way that would be hard to replicate.
It has been really fun for my wife and I to listen to our favorite music in the car, and then when my son says "I like this song" I "burn" him a little disk that evening.
He's turned into a little DJ, and has memorized a handful of his songs (and dances and sings along).
One caveat is that finding compatible NFC tags is a little bit complicated. if you buy from RFIDfriend [0] then they take a couple weeks to arrive from Germany.
Highly recommend!
[0] http://RFIDfriend.com
Wow, if I can set up a usable process for my brother to do this for his kids I might get my uncle of the century award locked in.
There's also yoto box, which lets you create "make your own" cards.
We have Yoto for our kids and I was initially skeptical (the cards are quite expensive) but actually it's been amazing. Probably the biggest benefit that we didn't even know is that they have a sort of radio/podcast thing for kids called Yoto Daily that's really well produced and totally free.
Mmh, I know the yoto play (https://eu.yotoplay.com/) but are you referencing to a specific open source project?
Yeah that's what I was referring to. In relation to the tonies. It would be a competitor to the tonie box. Both are popular in Ireland.
I did see some stuff about people reverse engineering the tonies back when we first got it, not sure if there's anything similar for yoto.
I love this! I prefer digital stuff (less things to worry about), but I miss the physicality, especially when friends come over. Books or CDs become a conversation.
If you'd like to do something similar, but don't want to DIY it, check out Yoto Player [1]. This is a small music speaker and they sell a bunch of NFC cards to "play" them. You can also buy blank cards and use their app to add whatever you want to them (music, audiobooks, even audio recordings). It's really well made.
There are a bunch of other companies with similar products. Some use miniatures instead of NFC cards. If you search the web for NFC music player, there are a few FOSS apps on github so you can focus on the hardware part and use their software on a raspberry pi.
This is also great for elders.
P.S.: if you fancy a cool project, I'd love to see someone reverse engineering Yoto so it gets the audio from a local server instead. This way we can use their great hardware, but can use any NFC cards.
[1] https://yotoplay.com/
I pulled apart my Yoto mini! I found an unencrypted ESP32, and managed to pull the firmware off it too.
My reverse engineering skills are limited, so my journey has paused there for now, but I would _love_ to be able to map out all the hardware & write open source firmware for it.
The Yoto set up is very smart (the NFC cards hold a Yoto URL, which responds with a JSON document describing the music & links to MP3s on S3, or m3u files for internet radio).
The only downside is that the Yoto will _only_ follow what I presume are allow-listed URLs, and has SSL certs for those URLs baked in, so if the company ever goes under the devices would lose almost all functionality, without new firmware.
I want to support Yoto as these devices are really great, but I’d also love to be able to drop my own URLs on cards and: - Play tracks from Plex like OP - Trigger lighting/mood changes with HomeAssistant as well as play an album - Play the music on network speakers (eg. Sonos), using the Yoto as the source
If anyone feels like they’d be interested in helping reverse engineer them, do reply!
> especially when friends come over. Books or CDs become a conversation.
There's nothing worse than when having people over, and sitting in front of a computer or device isolating from the group. The physical medium of vinyl albums or even CDs allow interaction with everyone instead of someone just clicking on a screen some where. What I read on an album covers might not be the same thing you read and take away from it. It just makes music sharing so much more personal.
Yeah, yoto works really nice for the same purpose. My kid's got lots of custom music on the blanks now. Both soundtracks from movies and custom playlists. I suspect it's going to transform into more of albums in the next years. Whether purchased or DIY, it's also a great solution to giving agency to a 3yo without something like "have an ipad with the whole spotify".
Agree. I have a 2.5yo girl at home, who loves songs at the moment. Before that, I was wondering if there is a way to give her some experience like playing albums, but not just the sound. Now I have found the way. (and we have a 3D printer)
CDs are now actually also joining vinyls in being revived for physical merch purposes. They're no longer needed, but if you want them they are available for purchase.
They're needed if you want proper digital copies for gapless album playback. You can't trust anybody to get that right.
Apple seems to do that reasonably right in my limited experience.
Apple fixed gapless playback in iTunes like 20 years ago.
Amazon music has gap problems today. In 2025.
And I remember winamp could do this way earlier.
I love CDs, and unlike records or tapes they have never really gone up in price, even with inflation. A new CD is still about $15.
This is one of the most absurd facts there is.
Back in the eighties when CDs were introduced, they were NOK 165 a piece for a new release.
Last time I dropped by my friendly neighbourhood dealer (of music, that is), the CD rack said CDs were NOK 189.
165 1985-kroner equals nigh on 500 2025-kroner.
Incidentally, an LP back then was NOK 89, equivalent to NOK 270 today - whereas an LP today would set me back approx. NOK 399.
Good thing my employer pays me significantly better than my parents did in the eighties. I can still sustain my music habit.
Not that it'll happen, or at least I haven't heard of it, but I'd love for MiniDiscs to also make a comeback (not that they ever were that popular), and see new releases in that format. It's my favorite one, a nice blend of CDs and compact cassettes (no worries about scratches thanks to the protective shell, even when you carelessly throw the discs in your pockets).
And they feel so futuristic!
After years of digital only I started buying CDs and books again. I am much more selective though. Just buy what I will listen to many times or for artist support.
Bought a total of 3 CDs in two years. Movies are more difficult, as I can't stand watching most the second time. Got some Ghibli classics.
CDs are digital.
But less so than Spotify or Apple Music.
+1 for a yoto.
It also led to my biggest ‘Doh’ moment with tech.
My sister showed it to me at a holiday house where we had no internet. I thought it was awesome, an offline music/audio player that her daughter could use. She mentioned you could make your own cards. It immediately reminded me of making mix tape cassettes and cds as a child.
I bought one the next week without doing any further research.
When it arrived and asked me to connect it to the wifi I was very confused.
I realised I made a massive assumption that “someone had solved the NFC card memory capacity problem”. I’d seen it work without internet and made all these assumptions about how it worked.
Obviously wrong in hindsight.
Still a great piece of kit, but I’d love something that was more akin to a cassette players rec/play/rewind/rec & Physical medium.
But portable cassette recorders still exist…
They’re a fantastic piece of kit! They have a Micro SD card internally and download the album/card on first use, then it can be used fully offline any time in the future. It’s a great trade off in my mind (though I’ll post one level up about how I wish it’d do even better here…)
You can also add stream URLs to a card. Thus we have a "radio" card which lets my son play radio stations from all over the world.
There is a technical difference though - yolo keeps the audio on the cards, while this project uses NFC tags to select locally stored audio. To have truly collectable experience, yolo type of thing is the only choice.
Yoto doesn’t keep the audio on the cards, all the audio is stored on the cloud and the NFC cards just have a link to the album. The Yoto can’t play a card it hasn’t already seen before without connecting to the Wi-Fi and downloading it.
Related: "How I Built an NFC Movie Library for my Kids"
https://simplyexplained.com/blog/how-i-built-an-nfc-movie-li...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41479141
I think mentioned elsewhere here, https://github.com/MiczFlor/RPi-Jukebox-RFID is great for this. I did something similar with an opp shop Fisher Price[0] record player, with the RFID reader under the turntable and each 'card' is a laminated record cover with the rfid stuck on it. Lots of good photos of different implementations in their issue threads.
We also use it for kids podcasts (autodownloads them weekly). I added a TTS script that generates a friendly audio message from a text file that can be triggered to play from an alarm or for a specific record. This announces the weather with a Dad joke at the end. I tried to automate the last one with various sources (db, LLM, etc - but felt too cold, so I just dictate it to the server from the phone) and usually add a customised message about our family calendar (wear a jacket for rain. cousins are coming today).
[0] https://www.amazon.com.au/Fisher-Price-Classics-Record-Playe...
Yeah I've also build a Phoniebox a couple of years ago for my kid. It has physical buttons, RFID cards or chips (some hidden in plush toys) and works very much like tonies, but with much easier access to anything you want to put on it. It's all in a wooden box including speakers. I've later extended it with a powerbank.
Haha, using that Fisher Price toy for this is super cute.
Luckily I never got rid of my old CDs. They have been sitting in a cabinet for decades and last Xmas I got my son a portable CD player for $35. They have been exploring all kinds of my old music, which is awesome.
I see it in your photos here - Dookie by Green Day is a big hit with my boys!
I did something similar with Home Assistant and Jellyfin for movies. https://github.com/philips/homeassistant-nfc-chromecast
super cool! thanks for sharing that.
Back in the day me and my friends would also trade cassettes and CDs for a week because buying one costs a lot of money for broke teenagers like us.
Hey I just bought this new Dead Kennedys tape I would love to trade for your NOFX CD!
Kids nowadays just take for granted music and it makes me kinda sad.
> Kids nowadays just take for granted music and it makes me kinda sad.
Maybe it's better to say they take their easy access to music for granted, which I think is okay. Isn't it better than not having access - or having very very limited access - because they're also broke teenagers?
I added a DK easter egg for you
Haha so cool! Fresh fruits is one of my top 5 albums all time. I remember buying it when I was a teen, life changing record. Thanks!
I've done something similar, for myself. I have a Tangara [1], which despite being quirky and expensive, I really love. It has an SD card slot, and while SD cards aren't as cheap as NFC tags, you can get hundreds from AliExpress for $1 each. I put one or two albums or a short mixtape on each one, and make a label for it myself. I don't use streaming services anyway, but now, instead of having music on my phone, I have a big box of SD cards I can physically arrange, choose from, and take with me. It also means that notification sounds never intrude on my listening experience.
1: https://cooltech.zone/tangara/
Nice project! Reminds me of a startup whom I met the founders several years ago: they had a system of hexagonal wooden tiles you could put on a device to play a specific songs (also maybe videos). I'm not sure the project is still alive but I found an article with pictures of what I saw: https://competition.adesignaward.com/ada-winner-design.php?I...
While digital files are obviously very practical and efficient for our pictures/audio/video I can't help but see how different our relationship to them is when a physical object embodies the data.
I love this, and so many good projects mentioned in the comments too. My son just turned three and we still have a real CD player that we use, sometimes, but now often it's streaming from Spotify or NAS. I was just thinking about how to do something similar, thanks for the inspiration ♥
I really like the idea. I also grew up in a household with tons of physical media to explore. I still have my blue ray collection but it’s mainly sitting in the shelf because I honestly don’t know what else to put there.
But I’m wondering reading all the comments from people doing something similar with alternative products etc how they do this legally? I mean I can’t just download stuff from Apple Music and play it offline on some random player. Same with most other streaming providers. Or are you accepting the greyzone here by saying you pay for the service so it doesn’t matter? Or are you happily buying all the content on some other medium / drm free stores to put them on these alternatives players? I specifically mean solutions where one needs some form of copy of the files.
I use Apple Music and have made a very similar setup to the article. Instead of the NFC pointing to a Plex URL, I have it trigger an Automation to play the relevant album on Apple Music. Works well, plays instantly, feels magical, and most of all it's got rid of the 'what should I listen to' friction so I now find my home is filled with music way more often. Downside of this approach is it only works on my own phone.
This article (not mine) explains the Apple Music/Automation approach – https://hicks.design/journal/moo-card-player
There are still legitimate options to buy media and download mp3.
Yes I know. But audiobooks bought are way more expensive than getting them from audible with the credit system over the course of one year for instance. I used to buy my albums rather than having a streaming service subscription. But I sadly caved in. I just wonder if all who report they do this for they kids etc really go out and buy all these great records and audiobooks etc. because for me there is a reason to have a subscription. An album on iTunes costs roughly 10€. For that I can listen a whole month to whatever album. Sure the album is somewhat mine when I purchase it (definitely when bought on a physical medium). At the moment I purchase my favorite movies digital even though I could watch them on Netflix and co.
It seems to me like this is more about nostalgia than current music. I'm considering doing something similar with my cd collection which is original from the 90s/00s with some back catalogue 60s-90s stuff thrown in. I listen to most modern music via streaming, but still buy the odd new release album that really matters to me (literally one or two a year).
I’ve ripped a bunch of cds which I think is not technically legal here but I have no moral issue, an we’d bought some.
Other than that with setups like music assistant you can stream from these services, it’s just a different trigger. I know that’s not quite what you asked but it’s a clean solution to play on the speakers you’d already stream on.
Why get hung up on the legality of something like this, assuming you're just going to use it for personal use in your home?
It's not morally wrong to take music you pay for and use it in a perfectly reasonable - and fun - way.
Well because at least from a German perspective one can get in lots of troubles when going the non legal way. Of course the question is how you do it etc etc. my question was if in fact people go the greyzone or start to purchase from alternative sources instead of using streaming services.
When similar topics come up I like to add this tidbit, also encourage them to listen to full albums. In order, no shuffle or playlist, just dedicating an ~hour to sit and listen to an album.
When any Dookie song ends I still automatically start singing or air strumming the next track on the album.
I feel something the same but actually feel the CD and records generations missed out on a lot as well, not that music was a formless thing but that it was disembodied, appearing from plastic discs and dumb speakers.
With my daughter I'm trying to just have much more music in the house, instruments laying around, singing and teaching her traditional songs and making them up together. I don't really worry about her not sitting around choosing between the Stones or the Beatles, as long as she's developing her own relationship with music.
The next phase of this process is that generations which will experience music telepathically will be extremely nostalgic for music perceived by means of vibrating the air in the living room.
Already there's a transition from bass (which you can feel in your body) to hearing music through tiny earbuds...
i love this take
Very good point!
I did a similar project... <checks date of yt video... oh my I'm old> 13 years ago. I haven't used it in some time, but I really do miss the visual aspect of selecting what to listen to... you've inspired me to get it rigged up again. Thanks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwyq2xqjHW0
My hacky solution, which is obviously way out of date and a bit specialised to my situation (in that I use kodi to play my music) is over here: https://github.com/Fuzzwah/xbmc-rfid-music
Awesome album picks. Odelay looks especially great on your card.
I made something like this for TV shows and movies using floppy disks. Each floppy has a text file with filepaths of videos on a hard drive. When the floppy is inserted a bash script detects it and plays a random video from the text file on the floppy.
I like the physicality of systems like this. It is much more satisfying to to flick through physical items than to scroll through a digital list of things.
You've got great artwork. I need to up the artwork on my floppys!
There's a demo video in my repo: https://github.com/geluso/floppy-vision
Like many others, I also built my own version: a raspberry pi with an NFC tag reader would map the ID to a spotify url to play the album on my google voice assistant.
The fun part about mine is that I slapped the tags to mini vynil coasters, and made a casing that looked like a mini vynil player, so it looks pretty cute. And you can browse your minivynils physically like you would with real records, which was the experience I was after.
See on github: https://github.com/coconauts/minilos
A similar project project I made is a floppy disk drive that loads retro games from floppy disks: https://coconauts.net/blog/2025/07/25/nfc-floppy-disks/
This is really nice! I also feel that the same way about how music, and especially the concept of an album, has lost its value in times of streaming due to giving up ownership, having access to everything, over-using playlists, and the absence of the visual art (i.e. packaging/booklet/liner notes) that used to accompany albums (and also compilations/EPs/single releases) when they were still physical entities.
A few years ago I made Zipped Album [1] as an attempt to solve this purely in the software domain by slightly changing the way we store and consume digitally owned (i.e. bought and downloaded vs. streamed) music. It contains a proposal for a simple single-file music album format that incorporates visual art [2], and an example cross-platform player for it that (hopefully) demonstrates how this can promote a more (inter)active/conscious listening experience [3].
[1] https://zipped-album.github.io/ [2] https://github.com/zipped-album/zlbm [3] https://github.com/zipped-album/zap
It's this gorgeous mixing of innovation and nostalgia. I love how you tied the haptic joy of finding music with modern tech the NFC + PlexAmp partnership. It's amazing how streaming gave music to everyone's fingertips but reduced it to something less personal, and your solution restores that sense of ownership and ritual. I'd love to see this be a bit of an open source kit or community project I suspect lots of parents and music nerds would leap at it.
Looks like a homebrew Yoto
Yoto is genuinely one of the most underrated pieces of tech. 10/10 for me.
We have a Yoto, too. We got it for my three-year-old and he listens to pretty often. My 1-year-old found it recently and I'm surprised at how much he likes engaging with it, too.
Yeah. We love our Yoto but I also can’t hook up Spotify streaming to Yoto cards, so this post is a very inspired way to bring back the “purpose” behind collecting the music.
I think a workaround to the Spotify issue with Yoto would be proxying a Spotify account through a raspberry pi or lightweight cloud vm. The Yoto cards themselves point to playlists in yoto’s cloud, and the playlists can link to files or stream URIs.
Yeah, we have a Yoto, and it's great. But their custom cards are pretty expensive. And, let's face it, I wanted a weekend project :)
You can use bulk nfc cards from China. I got like 50 cards for five bucks or so. Taking them into use is a bit more laborious (you have to record an official card first and then duplicate the tag to a bulk card), but considering the price is a no brainer.
oh cool, thanks.
Your project is super cool and really well executed. Thanks for sharing. I’ve had success with cheap blank NFC cards instead of the official MyYo York cards. I have a quick breakdown in my recent comment history if you’re curious.
thank you!
Love this project! That line about unintentionally teaching kids to consume music passively really resonates. I built something with a similar motivation – Muky (https://muky.app), an app for creating curated, distraction-free music experiences for kids. Different approach (digital vs. physical), but the same core idea: helping kids engage with music intentionally rather than as background noise.
I've never been super into music listening, though I do love singing. I'm curious what you think is important about this difference in approach. The idea doesn't come naturally to me - probably for the same reason intentional listening sounds more like a chore to me.
I want to be clear I'm not poo-pooing on the idea! I just can't connect with it personally, and if you're that into the topic, I figured you might have good insight into this idea, at least from a personal perspective :)
For me it's just a matter of being able to follow what's going on. It would be like watching a movie passively or listening to someone read from a book without listening to what they're saying.
Muky looks awesome for younger kids. The integration with Spotify seems really well thought out, and I like the 'iOS 16' feature!
I'm not in the target market for this, but I've heard other parents wish for a way to curate their kids' YouTube experience. For example restricting them to certain pre-approved channels. I wonder if there's a clever way to do that with a companion app, like you've done with Muky/Spotify.
I deeply resonate with this kind of physically interactive digital medium, some that immediatly came to my mind:
1. DIY live photo with Instax and tape that can be played in Califone Cardmaster (I've seen this in a Chinese video, you can search a lot of similar guides on YouTube)
2. Kazeta, the console DIY solution to let you play game by inserting TF card into a computer. discussed eariler here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45098269)
3. Digishot, collect physicall stamp on your phone (https://www.koto.co.jp/work/digishot/)
4. Finally, all the projects from Dynamic Land (https://dynamicland.org/) by Bret Victor.
We grew up before smartphones were ubiquitous, our digital experiences were tied to physical media. Cameras had film, Walkmans had tapes, VCD players had discs, and game consoles had cartridges. These objects are deeply embedded in our childhood memories, so seeing them today brings an inevitable wave of nostalgia and joy.
But it's more than just nostalgia. There's a tactile pleasure and a sense of accomplishment in using these physical items that a smartphone can't quite replicate. While phones offer immense convenience through countless apps, they also abstract away many opportunities for exploration and direct interaction with the physical world.
That's why, no matter how advanced our devices become—even if we one day have brain-computer interfaces—I want to preserve a culture of playing with and collecting tangible objects for myself and the next generation. My son currently uses a reading pen for his storybooks at bedtime. In the future, I plan to make him physical "launch cards" for music albums and games. These things serve as anchors, keeping us connected to the real world and preventing us from becoming completely immersed in cyberspace.
I built a similar project! https://github.com/zacharycohn/jukebox
My jewel cases have not survived contact with my 2 year old, and I've been idly thinking about more robust solutions.
> I think we're unintentionally teaching our children to consume music passively. My goal with this project was to teach them to discover it actively, to own it, to care about it at the album level. I think it kinda worked!
Some people also say that about prerecorded music and whine about when families had to gather around the piano to sing.
My three-year-old and I listen to music together, and he (sometimes) really engages with what he is hearing. He'll pick out the words and ask about what different phrases mean. I'll say who the singer or band it, what genre it is, and instrument is playing, etc. Or I'll turn it around and ask stuff like "do you want to listen to jazz, or bluegrass, or classical musical?" He's developing a pretty good ear, I think! And, of course, sometimes we gotta dance.
ha, definitely fair! everything is relative.
Curse you pianola! If only we knew.
Waldorf?
No. I'm paraphrasing a comment from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Liberalism_Failed. (A very important book no matter what part of the political spectrum you are on; even if you disagree with the author's opinions. See Obama's quote in the above link.) The author is the kind of conservative who values a family getting together and singing.
Basically, my point is that the attitude of phrases like "unintentionally teaching our children to consume music passively" always forget that the thing we're criticizing had the same criticisms in the past. IE, the whole concept of prerecorded music taught our parents and grandparents to consume music passively.
Very nice! I built a similar system with my young kids a few years ago called Qrocodile [1], which used a RPi (inside a custom Lego model) to control our Sonos system by reading QR codes printed on small cards. QR worked well because they're cheap to print. We printed a couple hundred album/song cards (each with album art) and a number of control cards. Fun project. Source code and all the instructions (for server, client, and card generator) are in the GitHub project [2].
[1] https://labonnesoupe.org/2018/02/14/introducing-qrocodile/ [2] https://github.com/chrispcampbell/qrocodile
cool!
I remember going to the flea market with my dad discovering new music by buying old vinyl records just by liking the cover art or because I've vaguely heard about the band. How times have changed even though t=ose flea markets with records still exist today.
I've been thinking about the same, but use old cassette tapess and just print a small QR code on the back, then rip out the intestines on an old cassette player and put in a raspi and camera to read the QR and play the equivalent song/album.
In Berlin someone made it a real product. Not sure whether there was any commercial success.
https://www.red-dot.org/project/moodplay-64498
This is so great!
On one hand, I love the possibility of having millions of albums at your disposal via streaming services. On the other hand, I hate having to type or click to select them (voice recognition just doesn't work).
Yours seems to be the best combination.
Congratulations!!!
thank you for the comment
Love this idea!
This could also be a way for social discovery that studios could promote:
Imagine a rack of album cards at Target where each costs a $1 and lets you play samples of all the tracks on the album (read lyrics and liner notes, etc) and puts $1 in your online wallet. So, kids (or anyone) could sample different albums and then save up to buy whole albums they like. Also, already redeemed ("used") cards would still play samples so kids could share/trade them as a way to say "check this music out!"
Can you imagine Billboard charts of Top Album Cards (Sampled and Bought) which would be so much more impactful than a lame count of streams or whatever. The charts would represent music kids are actually trading and talking about.
The rack of cards at Target costs more than $1/ea sadly: https://www.target.com/b/yoto/-/N-q643lentif4
Sheesh. Surely you could build that device for like $15, though I guess all the money would go into the speaker quality. Maybe it sounds amazing.
Very cool!
Reminds me of a very similar project I did for my (almost) blind grandfather. I used NFC cards too, but to play audiobooks.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8177117
Nice project, but It's interesting how differently one's formative experiences makes this subject seem.
As someone who grew up in a household in a small village, brought up by parents whose music collection was 99% classical music and who actively fought the influence of modern/US-centric culture, and with limited personal money (a typical album would have been ~1.5 month's pocket money) the current world of Youtube, Spotify, et al is a utopia.
I wish I'd had the problem of infinitely available music. :)
If your inkjet printer has the right tray, you can buy printable CD-Rs for about 25 cents a piece in bulk. And somewhat unrelated, I've also been printing out a lot more of the photos I take.
I got a Canon PRO-100 printer for $25 off of Facebook marketplace, they practically gave them away with higher end DSLRs so they're easy to get second hand, and a set of generic ink cartridges is about $15. With generic ink and generic photo paper, you can do a 13x19 prints for about 50 cents each. It's not archival grade printing, but it's pretty good and affordable.
> I used AI to extend the album art to the trading card aspect ratio. Highlighted are the generated parts of the artwork,
This was fun to read, I love all the little details that went into this, you obviously had lots of fun!
My friend's slightly less geeky approach was just to rebuy a lot of his classic albums on CD that he'd previously sold, which his daughters seem to enjoy at about half the age of the one in the story.
Possibly bossing their dad around to do the actual disc insertion is part of the fun at that age.
As someone who borrows books from the library rather than buys them (partly as an added motivation to actually read them within a set timeframe) I have similar thoughts about my bookshelves that mostly contain gifted books.
It's an interesting toy, but I wonder if this isn't someone trying to hold back the tides of modernity by making their kids appreciate music the way they did.
AFAICT most of the old musical tribes we used to arrange ourselves into are a bit of a thing of the past (punks/goths/greebos/grunge/indie kids/ravers/etc), and kids don't build their identities around music taste any more, because music is no longer so much of a scarce commodity.
Sometimes things just change...
That said, as a fun tech project, definitely cool.
Hi, I'm the "someone". It's me trying to have fun and do something special for my kids, hoping to find more shared connection with them.
Sorry I didn’t mean to come across as overly critical, and connecting with your kids is always a worthwhile activity. They certainly look like they’re having fun!
I’m just wondering out loud if people aren’t sometimes teaching their kids things that they did, but aren’t really a thing in the modern world. Maybe you’re doing them a huge favour! Certainly there is a large movement to appreciate albums again, rather than consume streams, and showing them it’s good to be interested in what the music is and who made it is no bad thing.
This is great, love that you’re giving your old MP3s a new life.
For the album artwork, be sure to check if there’s already a cassette j card or … minidisc album art that’s closer to the right dimensions.
Love this. What are you tapping the cards onto? What is reading that info and then pulling the music? (I'm not super savvy and can't figure it out from the writeup).
On iPhone, tapping an NFC tag with a URL opens a popup that allows you to navigate to that URL with a single click. If this URL is supported by an installed app, this app will handle this. For example, if you write a URL of a Spotify playlist onto your NFC tag/sticker (which you can also do from the phone via an app like NFC Tools), then bring that sticker to iPhone, it will show this as a Spotify URL, and you can tap on this notification and go to that Spotify playlist. So all you need to experiment with is a writable NFC tag and your phone, no other hardware required. I bet Android phones offer a similar experience.
that’s the right question! i’m surprised no one has asked it yet. part 2 will be all about setting up the raspberry pi with an nfc hat and a ‘read-only’ display as the tap target.
I just assumed they were tapping them on their phone and had some kind of app, or website something
no middleware/app needed. PlexAmp can deep-link to an album with an autoplay parameter, as long as the device with the NFC reader can access it.
The more old school alternative is to just buy old CDs and a CD player.
Used, you can find this stuff pretty cheap. Abd it's still more physical than NFC cards.
CDs have gotten a lot more expensive recently where I live. I used to be able to find used albums for under $5, but that is rare now.
and you get booklets!
This is amazing.
How do you anticipate your son will explore his own taste? Inevitably he will want to hear his peers' songs
Regardless, massive applause for what you've achieved.
Thank you! If his friends shared music with him, I'd be a happy dad. I just don't see any of them hooked like I was. It's more "single of the week" with them.
I love this. I have had a similar project on my todo list for about a decade. My intent was to just use album art image recognition though. That way you could queue up streaming service music using actual physical media or using printed card facsimiles which would be even more accessible without the need to include NFC.
I’ve made a conscious decision to not do streaming services. Having all the music is not much different than having no music at all. I don’t even want all of my own music on my phone. Instead, I use a set of smart playlists to give me a changing selection of songs based on ratings, how long it’s been since I last heard a song and how new the music is in my library.
> Having all the music is not much different than having no music at all.
This is an interesting statement; could you clarify what you mean? Taken at face value it seems like a falsism, but I'm assuming you have an interpretation in mind that would make sense to me.
It’s really just the idea that having a collection of music that I’ve curated through my own tastes means that I can safely do things like just tell my phone to shuffle all songs and I’ll be happy with what plays. Jason Kottke recently posted the kind of hacky thing he put together to be able to get music he likes playing through a web-based player that manages to combine all the various streaming sources where he gets his music and it seemed really sad that he had to do all that work while I can use my phone/itunes¹ in exactly the same way I did 17 years ago.
⸻
1. Yes it’s now just called “Music” but because “Apple Music” (intentionally, I think) confusingly refers to both the streaming service and the app I use to manage my digital music collection and because damnit, I’m the kind of old person from Chicago who still calls it the Sears Tower/Standard Oil Building/Northwestern Station/Comiskey/etc., I’m gonna still call it iTunes.
It's like having a library you built up over the years based on your tastes and the era you grew up in that you can idly look through vs having a search bar to YouTube.
I hear the same argument a lot when it comes to game emulation. People will say you shouldn't put full ROM sets on your device because it makes it harder to decide what to play and to stick to a game. Compare that to browsing the 30 GameCube games you have in a cupboard from 20 years ago. You can kinda recreate that digitally by only putting a select amount of games on your device at a time and trying to spend more time per game. This particularly comes up when discussing emulation on handhelds.
Bringing the conversation back to music, while I do prefer digital, I've got albums in FLAC on my phone and I re-listen to the same 50 or so albums a lot, only occasionally adding/removing from what's on there.
Not op, but to me this resonates because none of it is “mine”, none of it exists in the real world. There’s a huge difference between the music I physically collected (from libraries, friends, Best Buy, Christmas gifts, used cd stores) and uploaded into my iPod and lived with for years vs music I searched on a whim, listened to for a month while it was in my “recents” and then eventually forgot about once it was pushed out by something else.
Paying for a permanent subset of music transfers value to that set in a way that subscribing to everything doesn't.
There are two big offers with streaming services: catalogue and curation (playlists, up next).
On curation, taking one's time to do that oneself is arguably superior. You get to know your music better, tailor the collection to your tastes, discovery and growth is active not passive.
If you're really into a band or genre you'll also run into the limits of Spotify's collection. Artists have missing albums, some artists aren't there at all. It's not as bad as film and TV, where six subs are required to cover a broad range of viewing, but that's the enshittification pathway.
Also, real music people hate the mainstream, man.
I've been meaning to build a similar thing. I already have all the parts, but I was hoping to find a way to build something that simulated a small record player. Bonus points for a way to have a functioning turntable with the NFC reader + raspi hidden underneath it. If anyone has ideas or has seen a way to make that work please share some links!
I built a scanner with a nfc reader and esphome, and I made some 3d printed things to stick the tags on - the kids love them. I originally partly did this as not all songs play well when asked for on a smart speaker. I know all these are safe and I can put playlists on them too.
I like this idea. While it’s great to have all the music at my fingertips via Alexa + Apple Music (or Spotify etc), it’s actually not very conducive to browsing or recalling all the music and albums I like.
Something physical to browse like this is a pretty fun way to marry the physical world with digital music catalogs.
I built https://dailyalbum.art/ to solve a part of the browsing problem you're talking about. Nothing physical I'm afraid, but I do really love this RFID tap to play idea!
I've curated a list of 500+ critically acclaimed albums, which I continue to add to as the Mercury Prize nominees are announced each year, Rough Trade releases its albums of the year, etc.
It picks 12 a day and that's that; it's the same 12 for everyone. If you see something familiar, you might want to go for that. Or if you're in the mood for something new & different, you can give something unknown a try.
Nice timing. I’m right in the middle of doing this for music and video media for my kid (using an elaborate concoction of python, nocodb, home assistant, Jellyfin, a NAS, an RPi, and a chromecast) and the thing I had yet to figure out was the physicality of the RFID-sticker-containing cards themselves
I love this! Not just because I also grew up in the 90ies and like your music choice :)
As we drown in media and slop, I think it's super important to teach kids how to be selective, develop taste. And I too found that physical connection does help with that.
Great project and execution. It would be great if you could also introduce a social aspect, i.e. kids sharing/swapping cards.
(Did something similar for our then 3yo, since it's one of a kind, the social aspect is kinda not there. Yet! https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-04-20-boxie/)
"game boy for audiobooks" is so cool. Thanks for sharing. (dad) rock on.
NFC inlays are paper thin (~0.06mm) and cards are typically 0.2mm (Bicyle) to 0.30mm (M:TG).
We can use NFC tools to write an URI pointing at an audio file link using NDEF.
I believe Android will play the audio file when you tap the card on the your phone. (Apple will need you to confirm in a popup.)
Lovely idea but basically we got a tutorial on how to put a square onto a rectangle, print it and cut it somewhat wobbly, then profit?
More interested in the NFC side, how to flash these, how to read them, challenges, final costs, etc.
Changing the aspect ratio to fit a card is fine too, I guess?
Also, there are corner-cutters you can get from a hobby store that will make a nice, clean, consistent radius on those cards.
I have this one, for example (three radii!): https://www.amazon.com/Sunstar-Kadomaru-Corner-Cutter-S47650...
sweet! thank you
alright fair feedback.
This reminds me of the present I came up with for a mate's 40th.
I ran up a bunch of playlists on Spotify, pulled them down with spotdl, burned them to CDs, ran up some album art, and slapped QR codes linking to the playlists on the back. Was super fun.
First of all, this is super super cool. I love these cards, and how he's doing this for his son.
But it also makes me sad when people write things like:
> My 10-year-old doesn't have that. Music just sort of... happens. It's like it's infinite and invisible at the same time, playing from smart speakers, car stereos, my phone. Endless perfectly curated playlists, designed to fade into the background. The default listening experience has become both literally and figuratively formless.
That doesn't match my experience with Spotify, for example. By using things like related artists and radio stations based on an obscure track I've discovered, I've been able to become far more intentional about my listening and discover far more music than I ever could when I was younger.
And music that "happens" and "fades into the background" isn't anything new. That's what analog radio has been for as long as most of us have been alive. Only with far, far, far less choice.
So I love this project -- aesthetically it's super cool and it demonstrates a lot of love. I just wish the author wasn't trying to paint this narrative that the "default listening experience" is somehow getting worse. It's not. It's better than it's ever been.
I don't agree, endless music from faceless artists have made everything weightless and interchangeable, the never ending stream of recommended artists means that clicking next is more exciting than actually listening to something.
I remember 15-20 years ago, every album (even digital album) meant something, I remember trading CDs and MP3s with friends and listening to an album (or even a song) over and over again. Now we're spoiled for choice and very, very few artists produce something that will be remembered in 10 years, let alone 5.
I feel like you're describing some strange alternate universe. I genuinely don't understand what you're talking about.
Faceless artists? Artists have dedicated followings with fanbases where they interact more than ever before. Weightless and interchangeable? Artist's personalities are more distinct and individual than ever.
You think people don't listen to albums anymore? That they're "clicking next" rather than listening? Do you actually know anybody who likes music? I think you might not actually be in touch with today's music scene.
> Faceless artists? Artists have dedicated followings with fanbases where they interact more than ever before.
Not so much these days. Especially on streaming platforms where countless tracks that get pushed on listeners are recorded by anonymous session musicians whose works are sometimes put out under an assigned name for that singe track, then they get assigned a new name for the next track they put out. Even worse, a lot of music on Spotify and Apple Music are 100% AI generated tracks. Literally faceless.
> You think people don't listen to albums anymore? That they're "clicking next" rather than listening?
Many aren't even "clicking next". They're just taking whatever comes next over their speakers and letting their streaming platform decide for them what they're hearing.
Of course faceless artists exist if that's what you're actively seeking. And sure some people are putting on AI-generated tracks in the background while they study or whatever.
But that's not representative. Regular people who like regular real-life artists continue to listen to them, the same as they always have.
And I don't know anybody who outsources their music tastes entirely to e.g. Spotify. Like, you have to actually pick a playlist or something. You have to make some choice. And like I said, people have been "just taking whatever comes next over their speakers" by listening to the radio for many, many decades.
You're commenting as if something has changed for the worse in the past 15-20 years. It hasn't. It's only gotten better in terms of real music. And if you don't like the AI slop, don't listen to it.
> Of course faceless artists exist if that's what you're actively seeking.
AI generated music is shoved at listeners without them ever knowing about it. Spotify has even misrepresented AI songs as real (https://holrmagazine.com/spotify-publishes-ai‑generated-song...) and has been quietly stuffing them into playlists. (https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...) so even people who did actively pick a particular artist or a particular playlist ended up unknowingly listening to AI slop.
> And like I said, people have been "just taking whatever comes next over their speakers" by listening to the radio for many, many decades.
Radio never had a daily/hourly limit on how many times you could change the station. Radio wasn't filled with AI generated music either. Every song you heard on radio was performed by an actual human. If you liked what you heard you could see the bands in concert. Even acts like milli vanilli were better than scams like The Velvet Sundown (https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/tim-boucher-velvet-sun...)
Certainly people continue to exist who like listening to music made by real bands, but increasingly people are listening to AI generated music that is anything but distinct and individual.
The music landscape and the way music is experienced is vastly different from how it was back in the days of radio and CDs and yeah, I suspect that much of this change is for the worse.
Everything good in the AI generated music getting millions of streams came from humans whose talent and creativity were used in training the AI. If real artists increasingly have trouble getting discovered and building fans because their efforts are lost in a growing sea of AI slop that will be bad for artists and there will be less good music being made for AI to take and regurgitate back at listeners. AI will increasingly have to feed off of it's own slop and its hard to imagine that being ideal for music lovers either.
> I suspect that much of this change is for the worse.
I think you're just not aware of so many things that have changed for the better. So much better.
I just can't get worked up about AI slop music. It's not taking over. It's the easiest thing in the world to avoid.
Today, new artists can get started in SoundCloud and YouTube without label gatekeepers. They're not constrained by top 40 tastes. They can communicate directly with fans. They get discovered on people's curated playlists as well as custom "radio" stations.
Music is in a better place than it's ever been before. I'm sorry you seem to only focus on small negatives, without seeing the massive positive shifts.
I get the feeling you're not actually into music yourself, and you're just talking about news reports you've read. Because if you were really engaging with artists today, I don't understand how you could be writing the things you are.
The other thing that has happened over the past 15-20 years is that you've aged as much, though.
I remember being very excited about my favorite band releasing a new record when I was a teenager. Not that I don't enjoy that today at all, but I feel like the difference can be explained by my having heard dozens of more great albums since then much better than by the shift from physical to virtual media.
Looking at today's teenagers, I am not concerned about them not appreciating individual songs and artists enough. (If anything, I'd argue the opposite!)
> very, very few artists produce something that will be remembered in 10 years, let alone 5.
So... like most artists of any type since forever?
You are right.
Children today can be as conscious music listeners as we, who collected and sought out music of our own in our youth in the 80' and 90'. Or as unfastidious as those listening to top chart hits exclusively (including both Mike Oldfield and Milli Vanilli, whichever is in the top) in our childhood.
Two, possibly related anocdote.
My goddaughter is 12. She is in a revolting phase where difficult to find way to her heart. But we are on the same wavelength and can engage in hours and hours of excited conversation (we are 40 years apart btw.) about music beacuse she listens to those I listened when I was in her age or more. "Today's music sucks", she argues, and we share playlists. Actually I am able to show her those do not suck today but rarely found because you have to broese similar atrists of a similar artist from somthing you found by accident as a background music of a movie. These kind of discovery through huge music databases is great! About the same good as being lost in a huge vinyl/cd shop. You cannot touch, but you can listen!
Another is just interesting, and a reflection to the "todays music suck" kind of oversimplification. But also to how young people can discover their own music. Once in Germany waiting for a tram a loud group of graduating high school student like figures came by shouting the refrain of '99 Luftbalons' while it was playing from an uncomfortably loud boombox. I could not stop smiling thinking of them. : )
You're absolutely right. As a teen, I could only really listen to what my small income could afford. And CDs were expensive! It definitely made you savour that one CD that you could afford every month, but I'm not sure that is the superior experience.
My teen daughter has an incredible range of music taste and strong opinions about her favourite bands, much more than I was a teen. And I've watched this evolve since she was much younger. She has playlists with her favourite artists and she's constantly sharing with me, and asking me to go to concerts with her. All of that is through Spotify/Youtube music.
Yeah. I would want a father that is supporting and open to the changes of modern times. Not one that romantisises the past and pities the future.
But there have always been people who think the time they lived in were superior and the youth will be a lost generation with whatever is lost to progress.
Old man yells at cloud energy
do you have children? :)
Hmm w/o using Plex, I think the same can be done using a RasPi w/ an NFC reader to send a command to a remote MPD server to start casting to my Google Home devices. The NFC tag to album mapping can be managed using a plaintext file.
This is the next feature i want to implement in my own nfc player, which is essentially the same idea as OPs but only through vlc for now.
I run it on a raspi and uses nfcpy and python-vlc.
Its on github under nfc_player.
cool bro
Nice! I did this as well, but with python. Wanted to detach a bit more from the machine.
Made a python script that uses nfcpy to connect to an nfc reader and triggers vlc player through python-vlc. I think its nfc_player on github.
Cool daddy. BTW, there is round corner cutter on Amazon for few dollars.
What's your approach to expanding his collection - do you add cards based on what he gravitates toward, or do you intentionally introduce "bridge" artists to expand his palette?
Im not OP but i have a player for my kids which is basically the same. I do both. Sometimes I introduce songs and we talk about it, other times they hear something somewhere and ask me for it.
we'll see! probably both. for example, he likes Weezer's Blue Album, so I'll introduce him to Wowee Zowee next. I just want him to stay engaged.
There is a similar children's toy called Yoto that uses cards to load stories and songs on a player. I love the idea of hacking something together, this is really cool !
Tangent, I miss the carelessness of being young I just feel jaded as a grown up ha, referring to the video of her smiling with the card
In my case I think externally all the time like how people perceive me/I'm being judged
I started thinking about how to build this at one point but never got around to it. i've thought about doing this with QR code stickers, but the NFC approach might be nicer.
Poor kids forced to listen to the pop music of their dad's youth
That’s how I was raised. The Lion Sleeps Tonight, Summer in The City, Mr Bass Man.. good music is good music, no matter the genre or time period.
if good music is what makes you feel good in the moment then we disagree about the meaning of `good`.
haha. no one is forcing my kids to listen to my music. also, you think YHF is pop music...?
no one knows wtf yfh is today and no one will know in any future time frame (ftf).
An easy way to do this without needing to build a thing is to get into vinyl.
One of the nice things about vinyl is that historians will have an easier time figuring out what's on it than many of our digital formats.
What's easy about vinyl? If you want a kid to have a physical copies of music, then CDs generally cost between a third and a tenth the price of the vinyl equivalent and are far more "kid friendly" - not just the CDs themselves but the playback equipment. Unless you want to have them listen on one of those novelty mass produced plastic turntables that sound absolutely terrible, a good stylus on a decent turntable is just a kid's innocent bump away from destruction.
Because you can see a lot of the moving parts and get involved in the actual reproduction of the sound by playing with the stylus, touching the record, slowing it down, speeding it up...
Anyway, used vinyl is a lot more fun, and cheaper. Most of my collection was in the $2-4 range in the early 2000s.
We have a record player and some vinyl records in the house. My three-year-old is starting to like them. Today, he even was holding the record carefully by the sides. Made me such a proud dad, haha.
My 1-year-old, however is pretty monstrous to the records. We have some little kid vinyl that I got for cheap off a friend, and we placed those within his reach. He thinks they're interesting, but grabs the record or sleeve and bends them a lot. It's whatever, it's fine. But I did make it a point recently to move my favorite records to another room for the time being :)
ok but building a thing is the fun part
Sure but parents of small children often don’t have as much time for the building
This has to be one of the coolest, near zero cost projects I've seen in a while. KUDOS to the author for the simplicity and creativity found on those cards!
thank you!
I loved flipping through LPs at the record store and would usually go through everything at my favorite stores. The flap-flap-flap of the cardboard sleeves was so soothing.
Was thinking of a way to recreate MTV for my daugther, for the same reason - to explore and discover outside the algo bubble on social media.
I did this by pulling down lots of videos from YouTube. Then, using this app https://www.quasitv.app to make an "MTV" channel.
It's pretty cool to have an all-day station on.
recreating MTV or a mid-90s alt-rock radio station for our kids would be a really fun little project.
I don't understand this concept. Can you show me how it works? Does it work on a stereo tower or only on a desktop PC with Linux?
I think this skips over /how to do it/.
Writable NFC cards are pretty cheap on Aliexpress and Amazon, they're writable with most any NFC enabled phone and apps like "NFC Tools" that let you input a uri.
If you don't have a Plex server like the OP, you could use a link to the streaming service you use.
?
Nice job!
I wonder what hardware is available today to actually store the music in the card? i.e. how slim and cheap can you store an album of mp3?
Without getting too fancy with the tech, I found a 10 pack of 128MB micro SD cards on Amazon for $15. Those seem like they'd be slim enough for an off-the-shelf option to hack something together for $1.50 per album, if you're not worried about having audiophile quality.
This reminds me of how frustrated I am that none of the music streaming services allow playlists of albums.
This is incredibly cool, thanks for sharing! As an album lover through and through, I am with you.
thank you
What a wonderful interface. Well done.
thank you
Very cool! (I would suggest not showing your kids face on the web though)
You can also buy a cheap cd player and some CDs from a second hand store
Meh I feel like this sort of misses the point. It's very cool technically but if the aim is to bring back a sense of connection to music then I'd say the execution is way off.
Music stores are struggling, if they go all that'll be left is Amazon and Spotify...
Here's my tip. Buy your kid a CD walkman, go to a music store once a month and give them a budget. If they're lost help them get started. If they make a choice they don't like then most stores will offer trade in. Eventually they'll even form a relationship with the store workers (shout at to Mark in Truck) who will give more recommendations. My son's even started listening to radio to get more inspiration and we pumped all of our money into the local economy...
I had a huge music collection of everything from thrash and death metal to new age and 80s. I don’t miss those days at all. I can’t tell you how many times I bought cds for one song and the rest of thing was garbage. When you’re a teen without a job or working to pay things like car insurance, gas etc, that 17 bucks was precious. No record store would let you return shit albums where I live.
Now I have all the music I’ll ever want for a low monthly fee, and I’ve discovered genres I would have never splurged for because of the limited resources I had at the time. My son does tons of music discovery through Spotify that I could have never done and doesn’t have to plop down 17 bucks for only 12-13 songs, 11-12 of which might be utter garbage.
See Yoto for the non-DIY product version.
I mean that's super cool, but faced with the same problem I just bought a second hand Sony CD player off ebay and lots of discs, people sell them for nothing because no one wants a collection of CDs anymore.
Seems like an excuse to play with NFC tags. These types of articles come off as sanctimonious. There is nothing superior about the cards. On a phone or computer you can get complete liner notes for any song. All of that is missing from this system. You don't need to justify working on a pet project. Just do it. It doesn't have to be "superior". It's ok if it's dumb.
I was surprised to see nothing about liner notes, lyrics, or other info that could have been added to these cards. Especially with the aspect ratio issue! Seems like almost anything would be a better use of that valuable space than AI hallucinations.
I want to make the cards richer in phase 2 (track listings on the back, at least).
Thanks for your vapid and misguided feedback, Doug Durham. I hope you find joy somewhere.
Thank you for your wonderfully misguided attack on me. Is naming me supposed to be intimidating? I made a comment on the material features of the project and not the creator. I hope you find joy. I recommend you spend some time outdoors and learn to appreciate the beauty in life. Foster a life of gratitude.
Clearly tons of people like this project. You don’t have to respond to the naysayers.
thank you
It is a bit of a humblebrag, like many parenting articles, but it's nice that he made something for his kid even if it basically an effort to pass on his own musical taste rather than investigate what cool new things are happening below the marketing radar of today's industry. I do wonder if it might not have been more involving to just get hold of an old record/cassette player and take the kid to the nearest used music store, but hey.