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Comment by sodality2 | Hacker News Reader

This is so cool! I do something similar for music - I have posters up for albums, and a small NFC tag is embedded behind the poster, so tapping my phone to the poster’s corner and clicking the notification begins playing it immediately. I really want to make a collection of cassette-or-record-style plastic cards with album art and NFC tags, and hook it up to a speaker, so I can place my album on a pedestal and it starts playing immediately.

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I do the same for my CDs. I have them ripped on Plexamp and I place the NFC tags inside a corner of the booklet. So I tap the phone to the corner of a CD case instead. But my plan is to build a device like OP's so I don't even need the phone.

Great idea. You could tag vinyl sleeves, too, so you could play from them as you look at them on the floor.

It’s digital-only but I have folders of records on my phone Home Screen. They’re shortcuts that play the album, and the album art is the icon.

What a great idea! Thanks! it never occurred to me to do this

What app do you have on your phone to do this?

I use "NFC Tools" to write the URL, which I copy the album/song URL from Spotify and embed it. When I hold my phone near it, the URL appears in the notifications, and clicking it opens it in Spotify, which then starts playing it. I have a bag of 100 tags I got from a friend so no shortage there.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nfc-tools/id1252962749 is the one I use.

Yep, that's the one! Very simple to use

Love the simplicity of this. Out of interest, do you trigger just the web player or is there a URL pattern that can launch onto a specific device?

The regular https://open.spotify.com URL is registered to be handled by the Spotify app on iOS devices, so no bouncing from Safari - it opens straight away in Spotify. Nothing to play on a specific speaker, though - but my homepod mini is nearby so a tap to my poster then a tap to my speaker starts my listening session.

Makes sense, cheers. Might give it a go

I have NFC Tools Pro from these guys, https://www.wakdev.com/en/ (but affiliated); I'm assuming you're referring to them. They're on Google Play store too.

I'd love to do something similar for myself, but having never worked with NFC I see there are tons of different options. Would you mind mentioning what tags you got?

An Amazon search for "NFC 215 round cards" on Amazon should get you there! There's also stickers if you want something more permanent.

I love vinyl so I built m daughter a wooden vinyl player with wooden discs that carry an embedded nfc so now she can put some vinyl on herself :))

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