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 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 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.
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.
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.
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 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!
> 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.
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".
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)
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.
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).
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.
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.
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…)
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.
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.
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).
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.
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!
> 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?
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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.
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Dead Comment
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!
[0] http://RFIDfriend.com
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/
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.
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...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41479141
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!
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?