What's the modern equivalent of flipping through CDs? Physical album cards with NFC tags that bring back the tactile joy of music discovery.
by Jordan Fulghum, October 2025
Albums you can hold again.
When I was 10, I blew every dollar I had on CDs. I remember sitting cross-legged on my floor, flipping through jewel cases, memorizing liner notes and lyrics, and most importantly developing my own taste for music.
My 10-year-old doesn't have that. Music just sort of... happens. It's like it's infinite and invisible at the same time, playing from smart speakers, car stereos, my phone. Endless perfectly curated playlists, designed to fade into the background. The default listening experience has become both literally and figuratively formless.
So I thought: what's the modern equivalent of that CD browsing experience? Maybe what's missing is something tangible that he can flip through, or even collect.
I could combine my old CD-collector brain with today's tech: take something fun and collectable (trading cards), dress them up with album art, and add NFC tags so they can be tapped to play the album on our home speaker system, all without a screen.
Away I went.
The finished product. Pick a card, any card.
The Setup
I needed to get the music into a format that could be played. I've long surrendered to streaming, but I still have my MP3s organized in Plex on my home server. Funny to think that these files are the same MP3s that I've been collecting since the late 90s. I wanted the NFC tag to be deep-linked to those same files instead of a streaming service.
But which albums do I pick? I had the idea to create themed "packs" of albums. The first pack is obviously "Albums That Dad Wants You to Listen To", and it's just a bunch of dad rock. But the idea is that each pack can be a different theme or genre, and he can build his own collection (and develop his own taste) over time.
Making em
I found a PDF template that matched the dimensions of trading cards, hopped into Canva and got to work. It was easy enough to find high-quality album cover images from Google, but....
The Aspect Ratio Goof
I was quite far into this project when I remembered the obvious fact that album art is square but trading cards are rectangular. Trading cards use a 2.5:3.5 aspect ratio, which is...not a square! Oops.
I looked at what they did for cassette tapes (also rectangular) back in the day, but their solutions were all over the place, from just cropping the square into a rectangle (gross) to having a giant white space next to the square art. That wasn't gonna cut it.
So, I used an AI diffusion model to extend each album's art into a trading card aspect ratio. The AI was (mostly) able to extend the artwork while maintaining the original style and composition. Not perfect, but a pretty fun solution not possible just a couple years ago.
I used AI to extend the album art to the trading card aspect ratio. Highlighted are the generated parts of the artwork, including the Marina City Towers which tripped up the model quite a bit, surprisingly. For Nevermind, I just dropped in a solid blue, color-matched rectangle. Take that, AI.
After ordering a bundle of blank NFC tags from Amazon, I learned that PlexAmp oddly has first-class support for zapping NFC tags to specific albums in auto play mode. A strange feature, but perfect for this project. Easy.
I printed the cards on our crappy HP inkjet printer at home. I used label paper that exactly matched the dimensions of trading cards, but after the fact, I realized it was kind of unnecessary. You can just print on cardstock if you have a digital template file. I cut them out and glued them to blank playing cards, but not before wedging the NFC tags between.
The grass on the lower-third of this card is not naturally occurring.
How am I gonna make these look nice in the house for my better-half? I found a trading card display model from Makerworld and 3D printed it on my A1. It turned out alright!
Once it was all working and in decent shape, I presented them in a nice neat arrangement to my son. He flipped through them like Pokémon cards, tapping the cards that were the most visually interesting. Daft Punk's Discovery was his first pick. He grabbed it, flipped it around, tapped it, and that One More Time loop dropped throughout our entire house. Boom.
Don't look too closely at the corners, oof.
I was happy to see that the physical cards encouraged active listening and ownership. Instead of music being background noise, it became something he could choose, hold, explore, maybe even trade with this sister!
It was all worth it for her reaction. And yes, I know she's just giddy about the naked baby.
I think we're unintentionally teaching our children to consume music passively. My goal with this project was to teach them to discover it actively, to own it, to care about it at the album level. I think it kinda worked!
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Comments
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 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.
By testdelacc1 2025-10-1115:411 reply I’d like to think someone in future would read my kindle books and see the notes I’ve made on certain paragraphs.
By Pfhortune 2025-10-1116:32 That would be possible in a sane world, but in this world, we have DRM
Vinyl records are easily damaged.
A CD collection would be fine, and depending on the genre might be available fairly cheaply second hand, or could be recorded onto CD-R.
By leptons 2025-10-1218:41 >Vinyl records are easily damaged.
Yes, and that provides a valuable lesson to a child. Everything about vinyl is a lesson, from "how does this make sound" to "what are the pops and hiss" to scratching it and hearing the results. Digital media also has lessons, but my preference is to teach a child the basics before introducing them to the complexities of digital media.
By lazyasciiart 2025-10-125:18 Claim to have? That’s an oddly skeptical phrasing.
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 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 :-)
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 turned into a little DJ, and has memorized a handful of his songs (and dances and sings along).
One caveat is that finding compatible NFC tags is a little bit complicated. if you buy from RFIDfriend [0] then they take a couple weeks to arrive from Germany.
Highly recommend!
By lazyasciiart 2025-10-125:22 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.
By ultrasandwich 2025-10-188:381 reply Having just received a toniebox as a gift for my daughter's 1st birthday, this got me so excited. Had no idea this was possible. Gonna get some of the NFC tags next week.
By dtkav 2025-10-1815:15 Awesome!
Here's the guide:
https://tonies-wiki.revvox.de/
If you're in the US i can send you a list of links for the supplies needed. Email in bio =]
By IshKebab 2025-10-118:05 We have Yoto for our kids and I was initially skeptical (the cards are quite expensive) but actually it's been amazing. Probably the biggest benefit that we didn't even know is that they have a sort of radio/podcast thing for kids called Yoto Daily that's really well produced and totally free.
Mmh, I know the yoto play (https://eu.yotoplay.com/) but are you referencing to a specific open source project?
By jcul 2025-10-116:23 Yeah that's what I was referring to. In relation to the tonies. It would be a competitor to the tonie box. Both are popular in Ireland.
I did see some stuff about people reverse engineering the tonies back when we first got it, not sure if there's anything similar for yoto.
By vitorbaptistaa 2025-10-1022:197 reply I love this! I prefer digital stuff (less things to worry about), but I miss the physicality, especially when friends come over. Books or CDs become a conversation.
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.
By jphastings 2025-10-1111:33 I pulled apart my Yoto mini! I found an unencrypted ESP32, and managed to pull the firmware off it too.
My reverse engineering skills are limited, so my journey has paused there for now, but I would _love_ to be able to map out all the hardware & write open source firmware for it.
The Yoto set up is very smart (the NFC cards hold a Yoto URL, which responds with a JSON document describing the music & links to MP3s on S3, or m3u files for internet radio).
The only downside is that the Yoto will _only_ follow what I presume are allow-listed URLs, and has SSL certs for those URLs baked in, so if the company ever goes under the devices would lose almost all functionality, without new firmware.
I want to support Yoto as these devices are really great, but I’d also love to be able to drop my own URLs on cards and: - Play tracks from Plex like OP - Trigger lighting/mood changes with HomeAssistant as well as play an album - Play the music on network speakers (eg. Sonos), using the Yoto as the source
If anyone feels like they’d be interested in helping reverse engineer them, do reply!
By dylan604 2025-10-1022:25 > especially when friends come over. Books or CDs become a conversation.
There's nothing worse than when having people over, and sitting in front of a computer or device isolating from the group. The physical medium of vinyl albums or even CDs allow interaction with everyone instead of someone just clicking on a screen some where. What I read on an album covers might not be the same thing you read and take away from it. It just makes music sharing so much more personal.
Yeah, yoto works really nice for the same purpose. My kid's got lots of custom music on the blanks now. Both soundtracks from movies and custom playlists. I suspect it's going to transform into more of albums in the next years. Whether purchased or DIY, it's also a great solution to giving agency to a 3yo without something like "have an ipad with the whole spotify".
By AliceH0521 2025-10-1112:31 Agree. I have a 2.5yo girl at home, who loves songs at the moment. Before that, I was wondering if there is a way to give her some experience like playing albums, but not just the sound. Now I have found the way. (and we have a 3D printer)
By bobthepanda 2025-10-1023:174 reply CDs are now actually also joining vinyls in being revived for physical merch purposes. They're no longer needed, but if you want them they are available for purchase.
By kevin_thibedeau 2025-10-1023:222 reply They're needed if you want proper digital copies for gapless album playback. You can't trust anybody to get that right.
By jdiff 2025-10-111:43 Apple seems to do that reasonably right in my limited experience.
By selectodude 2025-10-114:592 reply Apple fixed gapless playback in iTunes like 20 years ago.
By interloxia 2025-10-116:02 Amazon music has gap problems today. In 2025.
By lukan 2025-10-115:50 And I remember winamp could do this way earlier.
By rhinoceraptor 2025-10-114:211 reply I love CDs, and unlike records or tapes they have never really gone up in price, even with inflation. A new CD is still about $15.
By lb1lf 2025-10-1115:28 This is one of the most absurd facts there is.
Back in the eighties when CDs were introduced, they were NOK 165 a piece for a new release.
Last time I dropped by my friendly neighbourhood dealer (of music, that is), the CD rack said CDs were NOK 189.
165 1985-kroner equals nigh on 500 2025-kroner.
Incidentally, an LP back then was NOK 89, equivalent to NOK 270 today - whereas an LP today would set me back approx. NOK 399.
Good thing my employer pays me significantly better than my parents did in the eighties. I can still sustain my music habit.
Not that it'll happen, or at least I haven't heard of it, but I'd love for MiniDiscs to also make a comeback (not that they ever were that popular), and see new releases in that format. It's my favorite one, a nice blend of CDs and compact cassettes (no worries about scratches thanks to the protective shell, even when you carelessly throw the discs in your pockets).
By camtarn 2025-10-1416:44 And they feel so futuristic!
After years of digital only I started buying CDs and books again. I am much more selective though. Just buy what I will listen to many times or for artist support.
Bought a total of 3 CDs in two years. Movies are more difficult, as I can't stand watching most the second time. Got some Ghibli classics.
By RileyJames 2025-10-1111:131 reply +1 for a yoto.
It also led to my biggest ‘Doh’ moment with tech.
My sister showed it to me at a holiday house where we had no internet. I thought it was awesome, an offline music/audio player that her daughter could use. She mentioned you could make your own cards. It immediately reminded me of making mix tape cassettes and cds as a child.
I bought one the next week without doing any further research.
When it arrived and asked me to connect it to the wifi I was very confused.
I realised I made a massive assumption that “someone had solved the NFC card memory capacity problem”. I’d seen it work without internet and made all these assumptions about how it worked.
Obviously wrong in hindsight.
Still a great piece of kit, but I’d love something that was more akin to a cassette players rec/play/rewind/rec & Physical medium.
But portable cassette recorders still exist…
By jphastings 2025-10-1111:21 They’re a fantastic piece of kit! They have a Micro SD card internally and download the album/card on first use, then it can be used fully offline any time in the future. It’s a great trade off in my mind (though I’ll post one level up about how I wish it’d do even better here…)
By cja 2025-10-1114:14 You can also add stream URLs to a card. Thus we have a "radio" card which lets my son play radio stations from all over the world.
By majkinetor 2025-10-116:171 reply There is a technical difference though - yolo keeps the audio on the cards, while this project uses NFC tags to select locally stored audio. To have truly collectable experience, yolo type of thing is the only choice.
By fsargent 2025-10-117:50 Yoto doesn’t keep the audio on the cards, all the audio is stored on the cloud and the NFC cards just have a link to the album. The Yoto can’t play a card it hasn’t already seen before without connecting to the Wi-Fi and downloading it.
