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.
A CD collection would be fine, and depending on the genre might be available fairly cheaply second hand, or could be recorded onto CD-R.
Yes, and that provides a valuable lesson to a child. Everything about vinyl is a lesson, from "how does this make sound" to "what are the pops and hiss" to scratching it and hearing the results. Digital media also has lessons, but my preference is to teach a child the basics before introducing them to the complexities of digital media.
There is https://tonies.com, which is cloud based and pretty expensive, but hackable (https://github.com/toniebox-reverse-engineering/teddycloud).
Then there is the RFID Jukebox: https://github.com/MiczFlor/RPi-Jukebox-RFID
And Tonuino: https://github.com/tonuino/TonUINO-TNG
I built ours with the RFID Jukebox and wrote a little tool called labelmaker to print labels for audio books and music: https://pilabor.com/projects/labelmaker/, but in the end it took too much time to print so many labels :-)
I considered building sometime custom, but the tonie hardware is cute, portable, and lovable in a way that would be hard to replicate.
It has been really fun for my wife and I to listen to our favorite music in the car, and then when my son says "I like this song" I "burn" him a little disk that evening.
He's turned into a little DJ, and has memorized a handful of his songs (and dances and sings along).
One caveat is that finding compatible NFC tags is a little bit complicated. if you buy from RFIDfriend [0] then they take a couple weeks to arrive from Germany.
Highly recommend!
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.
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.
My reverse engineering skills are limited, so my journey has paused there for now, but I would _love_ to be able to map out all the hardware & write open source firmware for it.
The Yoto set up is very smart (the NFC cards hold a Yoto URL, which responds with a JSON document describing the music & links to MP3s on S3, or m3u files for internet radio).
The only downside is that the Yoto will _only_ follow what I presume are allow-listed URLs, and has SSL certs for those URLs baked in, so if the company ever goes under the devices would lose almost all functionality, without new firmware.
I want to support Yoto as these devices are really great, but I’d also love to be able to drop my own URLs on cards and: - Play tracks from Plex like OP - Trigger lighting/mood changes with HomeAssistant as well as play an album - Play the music on network speakers (eg. Sonos), using the Yoto as the source
If anyone feels like they’d be interested in helping reverse engineer them, do reply!
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.
Back in the eighties when CDs were introduced, they were NOK 165 a piece for a new release.
Last time I dropped by my friendly neighbourhood dealer (of music, that is), the CD rack said CDs were NOK 189.
165 1985-kroner equals nigh on 500 2025-kroner.
Incidentally, an LP back then was NOK 89, equivalent to NOK 270 today - whereas an LP today would set me back approx. NOK 399.
Good thing my employer pays me significantly better than my parents did in the eighties. I can still sustain my music habit.
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.
It also led to my biggest ‘Doh’ moment with tech.
My sister showed it to me at a holiday house where we had no internet. I thought it was awesome, an offline music/audio player that her daughter could use. She mentioned you could make your own cards. It immediately reminded me of making mix tape cassettes and cds as a child.
I bought one the next week without doing any further research.
When it arrived and asked me to connect it to the wifi I was very confused.
I realised I made a massive assumption that “someone had solved the NFC card memory capacity problem”. I’d seen it work without internet and made all these assumptions about how it worked.
Obviously wrong in hindsight.
Still a great piece of kit, but I’d love something that was more akin to a cassette players rec/play/rewind/rec & Physical medium.
But portable cassette recorders still exist…
https://simplyexplained.com/blog/how-i-built-an-nfc-movie-li...
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...
The fun part about mine is that I slapped the tags to mini vynil coasters, and made a casing that looked like a mini vynil player, so it looks pretty cute. And you can browse your minivynils physically like you would with real records, which was the experience I was after.
See on github: https://github.com/coconauts/minilos
A similar project project I made is a floppy disk drive that loads retro games from floppy disks: https://coconauts.net/blog/2025/07/25/nfc-floppy-disks/
I see it in your photos here - Dookie by Green Day is a big hit with my boys!
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.
Maybe it's better to say they take their easy access to music for granted, which I think is okay. Isn't it better than not having access - or having very very limited access - because they're also broke teenagers?
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.
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.
This article (not mine) explains the Apple Music/Automation approach – https://hicks.design/journal/moo-card-player
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.
It's not morally wrong to take music you pay for and use it in a perfectly reasonable - and fun - way.
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
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.
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
When any Dookie song ends I still automatically start singing or air strumming the next track on the album.
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
1. DIY live photo with Instax and tape that can be played in Califone Cardmaster (I've seen this in a Chinese video, you can search a lot of similar guides on YouTube)
2. Kazeta, the console DIY solution to let you play game by inserting TF card into a computer. discussed eariler here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45098269)
3. Digishot, collect physicall stamp on your phone (https://www.koto.co.jp/work/digishot/)
4. Finally, all the projects from Dynamic Land (https://dynamicland.org/) by Bret Victor.
We grew up before smartphones were ubiquitous, our digital experiences were tied to physical media. Cameras had film, Walkmans had tapes, VCD players had discs, and game consoles had cartridges. These objects are deeply embedded in our childhood memories, so seeing them today brings an inevitable wave of nostalgia and joy.
But it's more than just nostalgia. There's a tactile pleasure and a sense of accomplishment in using these physical items that a smartphone can't quite replicate. While phones offer immense convenience through countless apps, they also abstract away many opportunities for exploration and direct interaction with the physical world.
That's why, no matter how advanced our devices become—even if we one day have brain-computer interfaces—I want to preserve a culture of playing with and collecting tangible objects for myself and the next generation. My son currently uses a reading pen for his storybooks at bedtime. In the future, I plan to make him physical "launch cards" for music albums and games. These things serve as anchors, keeping us connected to the real world and preventing us from becoming completely immersed in cyberspace.
I 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.
My jewel cases have not survived contact with my 2 year old, and I've been idly thinking about more robust solutions.
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 :)
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.
Some people also say that about prerecorded music and whine about when families had to gather around the piano to sing.
Basically, my point is that the attitude of phrases like "unintentionally teaching our children to consume music passively" always forget that the thing we're criticizing had the same criticisms in the past. IE, the whole concept of prerecorded music taught our parents and grandparents to consume music passively.
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. :)
[1] https://labonnesoupe.org/2018/02/14/introducing-qrocodile/ [2] https://github.com/chrispcampbell/qrocodile
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 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 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.
Reminds me of a very similar project I did for my (almost) blind grandfather. I used NFC cards too, but to play audiobooks.
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.
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.
I’m just wondering out loud if people aren’t sometimes teaching their kids things that they did, but aren’t really a thing in the modern world. Maybe you’re doing them a huge favour! Certainly there is a large movement to appreciate albums again, rather than consume streams, and showing them it’s good to be interested in what the music is and who made it is no bad thing.
This was fun to read, I love all the little details that went into this, you obviously had lots of fun!
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.
Used, you can find this stuff pretty cheap. Abd it's still more physical than NFC cards.
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.
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.
⸻
1. Yes it’s now just called “Music” but because “Apple Music” (intentionally, I think) confusingly refers to both the streaming service and the app I use to manage my digital music collection and because damnit, I’m the kind of old person from Chicago who still calls it the Sears Tower/Standard Oil Building/Northwestern Station/Comiskey/etc., I’m gonna still call it iTunes.
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.
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.
Something physical to browse like this is a pretty fun way to marry the physical world with digital music catalogs.
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.
But it also makes me sad when people write things like:
> My 10-year-old doesn't have that. Music just sort of... happens. It's like it's infinite and invisible at the same time, playing from smart speakers, car stereos, my phone. Endless perfectly curated playlists, designed to fade into the background. The default listening experience has become both literally and figuratively formless.
That doesn't match my experience with Spotify, for example. By using things like related artists and radio stations based on an obscure track I've discovered, I've been able to become far more intentional about my listening and discover far more music than I ever could when I was younger.
And music that "happens" and "fades into the background" isn't anything new. That's what analog radio has been for as long as most of us have been alive. Only with far, far, far less choice.
So I love this project -- aesthetically it's super cool and it demonstrates a lot of love. I just wish the author wasn't trying to paint this narrative that the "default listening experience" is somehow getting worse. It's not. It's better than it's ever been.
I remember 15-20 years ago, every album (even digital album) meant something, I remember trading CDs and MP3s with friends and listening to an album (or even a song) over and over again. Now we're spoiled for choice and very, very few artists produce something that will be remembered in 10 years, let alone 5.
Faceless artists? Artists have dedicated followings with fanbases where they interact more than ever before. Weightless and interchangeable? Artist's personalities are more distinct and individual than ever.
You think people don't listen to albums anymore? That they're "clicking next" rather than listening? Do you actually know anybody who likes music? I think you might not actually be in touch with today's music scene.
Not so much these days. Especially on streaming platforms where countless tracks that get pushed on listeners are recorded by anonymous session musicians whose works are sometimes put out under an assigned name for that singe track, then they get assigned a new name for the next track they put out. Even worse, a lot of music on Spotify and Apple Music are 100% AI generated tracks. Literally faceless.
> You think people don't listen to albums anymore? That they're "clicking next" rather than listening?
Many aren't even "clicking next". They're just taking whatever comes next over their speakers and letting their streaming platform decide for them what they're hearing.
But that's not representative. Regular people who like regular real-life artists continue to listen to them, the same as they always have.
And I don't know anybody who outsources their music tastes entirely to e.g. Spotify. Like, you have to actually pick a playlist or something. You have to make some choice. And like I said, people have been "just taking whatever comes next over their speakers" by listening to the radio for many, many decades.
You're commenting as if something has changed for the worse in the past 15-20 years. It hasn't. It's only gotten better in terms of real music. And if you don't like the AI slop, don't listen to it.
AI generated music is shoved at listeners without them ever knowing about it. Spotify has even misrepresented AI songs as real (https://holrmagazine.com/spotify-publishes-ai‑generated-song...) and has been quietly stuffing them into playlists. (https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...) so even people who did actively pick a particular artist or a particular playlist ended up unknowingly listening to AI slop.
> And like I said, people have been "just taking whatever comes next over their speakers" by listening to the radio for many, many decades.
Radio never had a daily/hourly limit on how many times you could change the station. Radio wasn't filled with AI generated music either. Every song you heard on radio was performed by an actual human. If you liked what you heard you could see the bands in concert. Even acts like milli vanilli were better than scams like The Velvet Sundown (https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/tim-boucher-velvet-sun...)
Certainly people continue to exist who like listening to music made by real bands, but increasingly people are listening to AI generated music that is anything but distinct and individual.
The music landscape and the way music is experienced is vastly different from how it was back in the days of radio and CDs and yeah, I suspect that much of this change is for the worse.
Everything good in the AI generated music getting millions of streams came from humans whose talent and creativity were used in training the AI. If real artists increasingly have trouble getting discovered and building fans because their efforts are lost in a growing sea of AI slop that will be bad for artists and there will be less good music being made for AI to take and regurgitate back at listeners. AI will increasingly have to feed off of it's own slop and its hard to imagine that being ideal for music lovers either.
I think you're just not aware of so many things that have changed for the better. So much better.
I just can't get worked up about AI slop music. It's not taking over. It's the easiest thing in the world to avoid.
Today, new artists can get started in SoundCloud and YouTube without label gatekeepers. They're not constrained by top 40 tastes. They can communicate directly with fans. They get discovered on people's curated playlists as well as custom "radio" stations.
Music is in a better place than it's ever been before. I'm sorry you seem to only focus on small negatives, without seeing the massive positive shifts.
I get the feeling you're not actually into music yourself, and you're just talking about news reports you've read. Because if you were really engaging with artists today, I don't understand how you could be writing the things you are.
I remember being very excited about my favorite band releasing a new record when I was a teenager. Not that I don't enjoy that today at all, but I feel like the difference can be explained by my having heard dozens of more great albums since then much better than by the shift from physical to virtual media.
Looking at today's teenagers, I am not concerned about them not appreciating individual songs and artists enough. (If anything, I'd argue the opposite!)
So... like most artists of any type since forever?
My teen daughter has an incredible range of music taste and strong opinions about her favourite bands, much more than I was a teen. And I've watched this evolve since she was much younger. She has playlists with her favourite artists and she's constantly sharing with me, and asking me to go to concerts with her. All of that is through Spotify/Youtube music.
Children today can be as conscious music listeners as we, who collected and sought out music of our own in our youth in the 80' and 90'. Or as unfastidious as those listening to top chart hits exclusively (including both Mike Oldfield and Milli Vanilli, whichever is in the top) in our childhood.
Two, possibly related anocdote.
My goddaughter is 12. She is in a revolting phase where difficult to find way to her heart. But we are on the same wavelength and can engage in hours and hours of excited conversation (we are 40 years apart btw.) about music beacuse she listens to those I listened when I was in her age or more. "Today's music sucks", she argues, and we share playlists. Actually I am able to show her those do not suck today but rarely found because you have to broese similar atrists of a similar artist from somthing you found by accident as a background music of a movie. These kind of discovery through huge music databases is great! About the same good as being lost in a huge vinyl/cd shop. You cannot touch, but you can listen!
Another is just interesting, and a reflection to the "todays music suck" kind of oversimplification. But also to how young people can discover their own music. Once in Germany waiting for a tram a loud group of graduating high school student like figures came by shouting the refrain of '99 Luftbalons' while it was playing from an uncomfortably loud boombox. I could not stop smiling thinking of them. : )
But there have always been people who think the time they lived in were superior and the youth will be a lost generation with whatever is lost to progress.
Old man yells at cloud energy
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.
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.)
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/)
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.
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 have this one, for example (three radii!): https://www.amazon.com/Sunstar-Kadomaru-Corner-Cutter-S47650...
I run it on a raspi and uses nfcpy and python-vlc.
Its on github under nfc_player.
In my case I think externally all the time like how people perceive me/I'm being judged
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.
Anyway, used vinyl is a lot more fun, and cheaper. Most of my collection was in the $2-4 range in the early 2000s.
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 :)
It's pretty cool to have an all-day station on.
If you don't have a Plex server like the OP, you could use a link to the streaming service you use.
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?
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...
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.