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jonplackett

I just finished making a ‘physical’ music system for my daughter.

The inverted commas are because it’s actually all MP3s that are stored on a phone.

But the phone is in a box

Connected to a speaker

Running an app I made that plays playlists when she places an nfc card on the box

Basically it’s a bootleg Yoto / Tonie box but completely free, and our own music.

Also got a desktop app where I download stuff, make plays lists and it auto syncs to the phone.

She actually really likes it. Having a physical sense of what you own feels good!

I wish I could take all the credit but Codex helped, a bit…

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That gives me an idea: a "CD player" that accepts the entire jewel case and has a camera inside that reads the barcode, retrieves the album, and plays it.

I LOVE THAT IDEA SO MUCH.

It's so dumb and so functional at the same time.

My favourite ideas usually hug that Pareto frontier.

There's a free API for getting albums from QR codes

https://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/release/?query=barcode:50997465...

This was the first CD I ever owned

Also:

* https://gnudb.org

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB

* https://github.com/RecursiveForest/py-cddb

It’s funny, I proposed essentially this idea on HN awhile back and the pigpile of commenters who said it was a stupid idea made me reconsider whether I really wanted to share ideas here. It’s great to see that you actually did it. I’d love to read a blog post if you ever get around to it!

Just ignore everyone and make things you yourself want and love.

I saw a new Walkman yesterday in one e-shop. I hadn’t dump audio tapes… so kids will be all right :)

I was in shop the other day with my daughter and the walls were covered in cassette tapes as decoration.

I has to take SO MANY steps back to explain what they were.

I realised she thought all music was just magically created when you ask Alexa for it - so we had to start there to explain someone has to make the music first, and go back though streaming services, digital downloads, to having to literally go to a shop to buy a single song for £4 - which is probably about £20 now adjusted for inflation.

Phone booths, landline phones, Atari or Commodore computers with modems… 25 years is history now.

People born before WWI had to feel similarly when WWII started.

Funnily enough I have also set her and 3 friends up on a private landline network for them to call and chat old school.

One thing I love most about old tech is that it is single purpose = no distrations!

> she thought all music was just magically created when you ask Alexa for it

This is becoming more and more true.

Yeah she was just 18 months early on that one eh.

That is exactly what I had in mind for my daughter too, fantastic that you got that done

We are genuinely at the point now where you can just mostly summon this into existence with a coding agent.

I thought through the UI and tech stack and reasearched what would actually work first and then wrote a very detailed brief for Codex. And about 2 hours of back and forth and re-thinking later, it works.

One challenge was that the phone has to have the NFC UI on while looking for cards, but i wanted it to turn off while playing so I could have a hole in the box to a blank screen she can swipe to skip back and forward.

This stumped Codex - but I then had the idea to use the depth cam to detect cards placed on the phone, then only show the scan UI again when the card is removed.

So now it works really seamlessly.

1) Place card on, music instantly starts, even remembers where in the song and playlist you are.

2) Remove card, phone detects it can see at least a few cm, instant stop.

3) Place a new, or the same card on and that instantly plays from the last position.

Hacking a Tonie box would be so awesome

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