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> It would be nice if you could just place the card on you phone and the phone just reads the data and plays the music

With NFC you could embed a unique ID into the card and the phone accesses that data from it's own storage or from your online drive. I know it's cheating, but it's doable today.

I built this for my niece when she was very young. A raspberry pi and a little amp and some speakers with a usb nfc reader. Wrote NFC stickers and stuck them to little cardstock 'album covers' that I laser printed. When she put the card in the little box with the nfc reader it would trigger a python script to load the proper playlist into vlc and play the album. If you took the cover out of the box it would stop and clear the playlist.

Uh, GitHub link? This sounds awesome!

Never bothered, though I've found several similar projects that are running on less hardware.

I recently bought a dedicated device like that the other day for my kids.

https://us.yotoplay.com/

Thanks for the link. Seems like a well built ecosystem. The pixel art pairing with the card/audio is a nice hardware touch.

On one hand, feels like extra work to purchase and duplicate existing Spotify lists.

On the other hand, I’m attempting to keep my kids in “physical” world as much as possible. This is the best solution I’ve seen for audio. Could be worth some ongoing dollars.

Have your kids enjoyed it? Any sense of how often you’ll be buying new cards?

We bought about half a dozen to start with. We have a few more on some Christmas wishlists shared with family and there will probably be one in the stockings.

So far it's been popular. Not an every day toy yet but it is becoming more popular. My oldest is well under 5 years old so I imagine they have a few years to really grow into some of the rest of the content.

We originally got it as another option for some kind of media that wasn't always too high-energy as we got later into the evening. We're trying to ensure they don't stay glued to the TV until just before bed. They like having this as an option alongside books or other music. They haven't really figured out or cared for the streaming media content. We use it as a night time noise maker and nightlight for one child.

I do get it's kind of weird buying content based on nfc tags. It really showcases the hyper-drm landscape for this content. But in the end it's a decently built and high quality product that's incredibly smooth for a child to operate.

All makes sense. I currently use the Hatch for bedtime light and noise. Don't feel any need to replace it.

I'm picturing this as more a daytime thing. Kiddo is likely too young to appreciate the "choose yourself" aspect of it, so I'll revisit around age 3-5.

Techmoan has a review of this that's upcoming (it's on early release for Patrons), since they have released cards for the Beatles and Queen.

It seems like a pretty well-thought out system!

I think the Minidisc[1] is what you're after - 68mm×72mm (2.7in x 2.8in), 80 minutes of audio/~300MB of data.

I'm always confused by my desire for slightly inconvenient physical formats like this to make a comeback - I suspect it's some combination of 90s nostalgia (I'm mid-40s) and a psychological reaction to the enshitification of culture now being an endless subscription service.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc

the good thing about miniDisc is that its relatively easy to get the tracks back off it again. like if you wanted to share a disc with a friend, they could copy the tracks onto their computer using webminidisc or some other software. all the software is a bit old and janky but it's quicker than having to copy a tape!

It's the right size for sure, but you can buy 32GB of Micro SD for about $10. And and an SD card reader is a lot easier to find. The are just a little too small. :)

It's not just nostalgia. I think when you start looking for them there are a lot of good reasons to start doing this.

Physical backups, privacy of not having so much life online, less subscriptions required (dropbox), easier sharing without gate keepers.

SanDisk should make something. A credit card with a few small raised bumps for the connection so you can just rest it on a surface rather than having to plug it in. Then a simple little USB reader that is just a flat surface you can place on your desk.

Just before flash-based MP3 players came to dominate, I had a second gen "Hi-MD" MiniDisc player. Each disc was 1 GB, you plugged the player into the computer and it showed up as regular USB mass storage, just drag and drop the MP3s over.

The downside with larger disks like the 1 GB Hi-MD is that you can fit 200-400 songs, depending on bitrate. So you no longer get the physical connection "this disk is album X".

If anyone is looking to purchase, beware: first-gen Hi-MD devices (IIRC) were crippled by needing to use Sony's DRM management tool called SonicStage for transfering songs, it was slow as shit and annoying, probably only usable on WinXP or something today.

There is still a pretty thriving mini disc community

Credit cards would be nice. But you need an angle, something they'd do that you can't do with Spotify. Otherwise they'll never take off.

How about never delete your stuff because contract terms changed in the backend?

Don't invent a new format, but create a credit card-sized adaptor for microSD — like the microSD to SD adaptors but bigger. Call it 'macroSD'. Build NFC into the adaptor.

Edit: smart cards would be ideal if they had more memory. AFAIK they only have a few MB.

Why not just use the SD card size?

Well people do. Just lacks NFC, and a bit small.

You can get business-card shaped CDs. Mentioned here: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootable_business_card

But then you need a CD reader, which is kinda hard to get these days.

USB CD/DVD drives are cheap and available.

I spent many hours reading and looking at the inserts that came with CDs.