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I was thinking the other week, I wouldn't mind having a nice physical copy of a lot of my data. There was something "human" about flipping through my CD collect
by jay_kyburz 3y ago
I was thinking the other week, I wouldn't mind having a nice physical copy of a lot of my data. There was something "human" about flipping through my CD collection looking for something to put on. Or browsing the bookshelf, looking for a book to read.
I think it needs to be bigger than Micro SD, more surface area for art than a thumb drive, but a CD is too big I think.
A game boy cartridge would be a good size I think, or perhaps a credit card.
I would love a box of credit card size memory sticks. I could could flip through them, share one with a friend, carry them around. More physical that just moving files on and off my phone.
One card for each band perhaps, or each author. All of Tools albums, or the collected works for G.R.R. Martin.
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. Or rest it on your laptop and browse it like it was a drive.
It would never take off, but nice to dream about.
- dfex 3y agoI 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc
- mackrevinack 3y agothe 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!
- jay_kyburz 3y agoIt'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.
- semi-extrinsic 3y agoJust 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.
- dist-epoch 3y ago> 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.
- sleepybrett 3y agoI 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.
- mauvehaus 3y agoUh, GitHub link? This sounds awesome!
- sleepybrett 3y agoNever bothered, though I've found several similar projects that are running on less hardware.
- vel0city 3y agoI recently bought a dedicated device like that the other day for my kids. https://us.yotoplay.com/ https://us.yotoplay.com/
- DoingSomeThings 3y agoThanks 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?
- toyg 3y agoCredit 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.
- foobarian 3y agoHow about never delete your stuff because contract terms changed in the backend?
- perilunar 3y agoDon'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.
- robocat 3y agoYou can get business-card shaped CDs. Mentioned here: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootable_business_card https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootable_business_card
- toyg 3y agoBut then you need a CD reader, which is kinda hard to get these days.
- hattmall 3y agoI spent many hours reading and looking at the inserts that came with CDs.
- dools 3y agoThere is still a pretty thriving mini disc community