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.
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.
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.
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".
> 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.
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 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).
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 never been super into music listening, though I do love singing. I'm curious what you think is important about this difference in approach. The idea doesn't come naturally to me - probably for the same reason intentional listening sounds more like a chore to me.
I want to be clear I'm not poo-pooing on the idea! I just can't connect with it personally, and if you're that into the topic, I figured you might have good insight into this idea, at least from a personal perspective :)
For me it's just a matter of being able to follow what's going on. It would be like watching a movie passively or listening to someone read from a book without listening to what they're saying.
Muky looks awesome for younger kids. The integration with Spotify seems really well thought out, and I like the 'iOS 16' feature!
I'm not in the target market for this, but I've heard other parents wish for a way to curate their kids' YouTube experience. For example restricting them to certain pre-approved channels. I wonder if there's a clever way to do that with a companion app, like you've done with Muky/Spotify.
I 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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!
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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'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.
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.
https://simplyexplained.com/blog/how-i-built-an-nfc-movie-li...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41479141
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 :-)
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...
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.
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.
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
Something physical to browse like this is a pretty fun way to marry the physical world with digital music catalogs.
When any Dookie song ends I still automatically start singing or air strumming the next track on the album.
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.
[1] https://labonnesoupe.org/2018/02/14/introducing-qrocodile/ [2] https://github.com/chrispcampbell/qrocodile
In my case I think externally all the time like how people perceive me/I'm being judged
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.
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.
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.
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...
Some people also say that about prerecorded music and whine about when families had to gather around the piano to sing.
This was fun to read, I love all the little details that went into this, you obviously had lots of fun!
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.
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 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?
If you don't have a Plex server like the OP, you could use a link to the streaming service you use.
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/)
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.)
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.