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lexx
testdelacc1
I’d like to think someone in future would read my kindle books and see the notes I’ve made on certain paragraphs.
Pfhortune
That would be possible in a sane world, but in this world, we have DRM
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leptons
[flagged]
Symbiote
Vinyl records are easily damaged.
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.
leptons
>Vinyl records are easily damaged.
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.
lazyasciiart
Claim to have? That’s an oddly skeptical phrasing.
sandreas
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 :-)
dtkav
I recently bought the toniebox to hack it for my son's 4th birthday. It has become his favorite object.
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!
lazyasciiart
Wow, if I can set up a usable process for my brother to do this for his kids I might get my uncle of the century award locked in.
ultrasandwich
Having just received a toniebox as a gift for my daughter's 1st birthday, this got me so excited. Had no idea this was possible. Gonna get some of the NFC tags next week.
dtkav
Awesome!
Here's the guide:
https://tonies-wiki.revvox.de/
If you're in the US i can send you a list of links for the supplies needed. Email in bio =]
jcul
There's also yoto box, which lets you create "make your own" cards.
IshKebab
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.
sandreas
Mmh, I know the yoto play (https://eu.yotoplay.com/) but are you referencing to a specific open source project?
jcul
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.
vitorbaptistaa
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.
jphastings
I pulled apart my Yoto mini! I found an unencrypted ESP32, and managed to pull the firmware off it too.
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!
dylan604
> 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.
viraptor
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".
AliceH0521
Agree. I have a 2.5yo girl at home, who loves songs at the moment. Before that, I was wondering if there is a way to give her some experience like playing albums, but not just the sound. Now I have found the way. (and we have a 3D printer)
bobthepanda
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.
kevin_thibedeau
They're needed if you want proper digital copies for gapless album playback. You can't trust anybody to get that right.
jdiff
Apple seems to do that reasonably right in my limited experience.
selectodude
Apple fixed gapless playback in iTunes like 20 years ago.
rhinoceraptor
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.
lb1lf
This is one of the most absurd facts there is.
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.
Contax
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).
camtarn
And they feel so futuristic!
canpan
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.
perilunar
CDs are digital.
RileyJames
+1 for a yoto.
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…
jphastings
They’re a fantastic piece of kit! They have a Micro SD card internally and download the album/card on first use, then it can be used fully offline any time in the future. It’s a great trade off in my mind (though I’ll post one level up about how I wish it’d do even better here…)
cja
You can also add stream URLs to a card. Thus we have a "radio" card which lets my son play radio stations from all over the world.
majkinetor
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.
fsargent
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.
bariumbitmap
Related: "How I Built an NFC Movie Library for my Kids"
https://simplyexplained.com/blog/how-i-built-an-nfc-movie-li...
neumann
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...
nedt
Yeah I've also build a Phoniebox a couple of years ago for my kid. It has physical buttons, RFID cards or chips (some hidden in plush toys) and works very much like tonies, but with much easier access to anything you want to put on it. It's all in a wooden box including speakers. I've later extended it with a powerbank.
squigz
Haha, using that Fisher Price toy for this is super cute.
lubujackson
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!
philips
I did something similar with Home Assistant and Jellyfin for movies. https://github.com/philips/homeassistant-nfc-chromecast
jordanf
super cool! thanks for sharing that.
lawgimenez
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.
squigz
> 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?
jordanf
I added a DK easter egg for you
lawgimenez
Haha so cool! Fresh fruits is one of my top 5 albums all time. I remember buying it when I was a teen, life changing record. Thanks!
NoraCodes
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.
blaze33
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.
paffdragon
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 ♥
larusso
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.
fireinsnow
I use Apple Music and have made a very similar setup to the article. Instead of the NFC pointing to a Plex URL, I have it trigger an Automation to play the relevant album on Apple Music. Works well, plays instantly, feels magical, and most of all it's got rid of the 'what should I listen to' friction so I now find my home is filled with music way more often. Downside of this approach is it only works on my own phone.
This article (not mine) explains the Apple Music/Automation approach – https://hicks.design/journal/moo-card-player
ozim
There are still legitimate options to buy media and download mp3.
larusso
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.
oneeyedpigeon
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).
IanCal
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.
squigz
Why get hung up on the legality of something like this, assuming you're just going to use it for personal use in your home?
It's not morally wrong to take music you pay for and use it in a perfectly reasonable - and fun - way.
larusso
Well because at least from a German perspective one can get in lots of troubles when going the non legal way. Of course the question is how you do it etc etc. my question was if in fact people go the greyzone or start to purchase from alternative sources instead of using streaming services.
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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.