I Built Physical Album Cards with Nfc Tags to Teach My Son Music Discovery

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 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.

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/)

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 :-)

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?

[1] https://labonnesoupe.org/2018/02/14/introducing-qrocodile/ [2] https://github.com/chrispcampbell/qrocodile

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...

Something physical to browse like this is a pretty fun way to marry the physical world with digital music catalogs.

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.

Used, you can find this stuff pretty cheap. Abd it's still more physical than NFC cards.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!!!

When any Dookie song ends I still automatically start singing or air strumming the next track on the album.

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.

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...

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.)

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.

https://simplyexplained.com/blog/how-i-built-an-nfc-movie-li...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41479141

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.

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

In my case I think externally all the time like how people perceive me/I'm being judged

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 see it in your photos here - Dookie by Green Day is a big hit with my boys!

This was fun to read, I love all the little details that went into this, you obviously had lots of fun!