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I built physical album cards with NFC tags to teach my son music discovery

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Re: I built physical album cards with NFC tags to teach my son music discovery

#191

Post by fladd »

This is really nice! I also feel that the same way about how music, and especially the concept of an album, has lost its value in times of streaming due to giving up ownership, having access to everything, over-using playlists, and the absence of the visual art (i.e. packaging/booklet/liner notes) that used to accompany albums (and also compilations/EPs/single releases) when they were still physical entities.

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

Re: I built physical album cards with NFC tags to teach my son music discovery

#192

Post by leptons »

lexx wrote: post #82

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…

[flagged]

Re: I built physical album cards with NFC tags to teach my son music discovery

#194

Post by doug_durham »

jordanf wrote: post #135
doug_durham wrote: post #58

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.

Thanks for your vapid and misguided feedback, Doug Durham. I hope you find joy somewhere.

Thank you for your wonderfully misguided attack on me. Is naming me supposed to be intimidating? I made a comment on the material features of the project and not the creator. I hope you find joy. I recommend you spend some time outdoors and learn to appreciate the beauty in life. Foster a life of gratitude.

Re: I built physical album cards with NFC tags to teach my son music discovery

#195

Post by dhosek »

hatthew wrote: post #62
dhosek wrote: post #29

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 really just the idea that having a collection of music that I’ve curated through my own tastes means that I can safely do things like just tell my phone to shuffle all songs and I’ll be happy with what plays. Jason Kottke recently posted the kind of hacky thing he put together to be able to get music he likes playing through a web-based player that manages to combine all the various streaming sources where he gets his music and it seemed really sad that he had to do all that work while I can use my phone/itunes¹ in exactly the same way I did 17 years ago.

⸻

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.

Re: I built physical album cards with NFC tags to teach my son music discovery

#196

Post by novoreorx »

I deeply resonate with this kind of physically interactive digital medium, some that immediatly came to my mind:

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.

Re: I built physical album cards with NFC tags to teach my son music discovery

#197

Post by Nursie »

jordanf wrote: post #134
Nursie wrote: post #85

It's an interesting toy, but I wonder if this isn't someone trying to hold back the tides of modernity by making their kids appreciate music the way they did. 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…

Hi, I'm the "someone". It's me trying to have fun and do something special for my kids, hoping to find more shared connection with them.

Sorry I didn’t mean to come across as overly critical, and connecting with your kids is always a worthwhile activity. They certainly look like they’re having fun!

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.

Re: I built physical album cards with NFC tags to teach my son music discovery

#198

Post by autoexec »

crazygringo wrote: post #189
autoexec wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Faceless artists? Artists have dedicated followings with fanbases where they interact more than ever before. 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 wors…

Of course faceless artists exist if that's what you're actively seeking. And sure some people are putting on AI-generated tracks in the background while they study or whatever. 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 a…

> Of course faceless artists exist if that's what you're actively seeking.

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.

Re: I built physical album cards with NFC tags to teach my son music discovery

#199

Post by lazyasciiart »

leptons wrote: post #192
lexx wrote: post #82

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…

[flagged]

Claim to have? That’s an oddly skeptical phrasing.

Re: I built physical album cards with NFC tags to teach my son music discovery

#200

Post by lazyasciiart »

dtkav wrote: post #153
sandreas wrote: post #35

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…

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 turne…

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.
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