Album Cards: Rebuilding the Joy of Music Discovery for My 10-Year-Old
fulghum.io/album-cards
What Jamie wrote
I need to set the stage for this article. If you would have stopped by before the era of digital music you may have taken a moment to browse the 1,800+ CD collection that I had alphabetically organized on display. I distinctly remember finding these very clean, modern looking CD racks with silver rods. The jewel cases fit perfectly at an angle that made them easy to read. I would go find five CD's and load them into the 5-disc CD changer and have a great time. Thinking back on it I enjoyed that music collection in ways that I get nothing from today's world of streaming.
So with that I found this article just awesome…
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.
How to do it?
The process was simple: open PlexAmp, navigate to an album, tap the three dots menu, then Share, and there's a "Write to NFC tag" option. Hold your phone over the blank NFC tag and it writes the deep link. That's it. The tag just contains a URL that opens PlexAmp and starts playing that specific album when tapped.
I am so in love with this concept that I want to start printing Music cards right now!
At our cabin we have a record player and a small collection of vinyl LPs. It is great and a wonderful way to listen to music. I have Plex servers and still have all the MP3 files that I ripped from those 1,800+ CDs. By the way, I still have all those CD's in archival cases as well. I regularly think when listening to records that it is awesome that no service in the cloud knows what we are doing. No company is monetizing the fact that I’m again listening to this beautiful colored vinyl Brandi Carlile album.
Maybe some NFC tags and fancy cards are the way to create that feeling even more.