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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.

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.

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 :-)

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 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/

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

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/

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...

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 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 ♥

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.

I did something similar with Home Assistant and Jellyfin for movies. https://github.com/philips/homeassistant-nfc-chromecast

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.

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. :)

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 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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

Looks like a homebrew Yoto

In Berlin someone made it a real product. Not sure whether there was any commercial success.

https://www.red-dot.org/project/moodplay-64498

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 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'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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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).

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?

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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 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.

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 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!

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?

This reminds me of how frustrated I am that none of the music streaming services allow playlists of albums.

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!

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.

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/)

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 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 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.

Very cool! (I would suggest not showing your kids face on the web though)

Poor kids forced to listen to the pop music of their dad's youth

What a wonderful interface. Well done.

You can also buy a cheap cd player and some CDs from a second hand store

I think this skips over /how to do it/.

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?

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.

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!!!

This is incredibly cool, thanks for sharing! As an album lover through and through, I am with you.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.