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.
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 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.
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.
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!
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.
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 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.
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 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 :-)
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'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!
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).
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.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 60.2 ms ] threadHow 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.
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.
Some people also say that about prerecorded music and whine about when families had to gather around the piano to sing.
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.
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.
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/)
I see it in your photos here - Dookie by Green Day is a big hit with my boys!
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.
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/
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 :-)
This was fun to read, I love all the little details that went into this, you obviously had lots of fun!
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?
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?
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