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 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.
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 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.
> 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".
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.
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 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 :-)
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.
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.
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’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.
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 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).
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.
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 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
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).
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'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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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...
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 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.
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!
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’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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
Very good point!
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 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/
> 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".
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 :-)
There's also yoto box, which lets you create "make your own" cards.
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.
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.
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.
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’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.
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 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...
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
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.
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.
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!
In Berlin someone made it a real product. Not sure whether there was any commercial success.
https://www.red-dot.org/project/moodplay-64498
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
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!!!
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'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.
I did something similar with Home Assistant and Jellyfin for movies. https://github.com/philips/homeassistant-nfc-chromecast
super cool! thanks for sharing that.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Looks like a homebrew Yoto
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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
You can also buy a cheap cd player and some CDs from a second hand store
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.
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...
Poor kids forced to listen to the pop music of their dad's youth
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
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.
Very cool! (I would suggest not showing your kids face on the web though)
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.
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!
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’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.
Paying for a permanent subset of music transfers value to that set in a way that subscribing to everything doesn't.
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.
Also, real music people hate the mainstream, man.
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
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.
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
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
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.
> 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!
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.
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
This is incredibly cool, thanks for sharing! As an album lover through and through, I am with 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.
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.
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.
What a wonderful interface. Well done.
thank you
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.