Creating a physical musical library with NFC tags

I’m not sure if it’s the PLA filament, the 3d print design, or my oily fingers, but the corners of my cover-art stickers keep peeling off the 3D-printed albums.

Next step is steal one of my kids’ glue sticks to see if that impvoes the adhesion…

After a couple of days of 3d printing and switching filaments to make different colours of cartridges, I’ve amassed a collection of ~15 albums ready for listening, complete with printed cover art.

My inkjet printer is fast, but has potato quality for photos. One day I’ll upgrade…

For now though, it’s super cool to have actual albums I can physically flip through and play.

Next step is to make more, and to start work on a standalone player because the phone-tap experience is slower than I want

The size of the sticker window is fixed (after another frustrating set of attempts to get the depth just right), so I’m calling this done for now.

I may decide on other color-ways when I start making more of these because the black seems harsh, but for now this works!

Success! The sticker window is too small, but the NFC tag now fits in the the slot properly AND is still readable by my phone!

And now I set the pause too early and the top of chip is exposed, so the print/head will collide it when trying to lay filament.

This is some combination of comical and embarrassing for such a simple thing

Second attempt at a horizontal print failed, and for the same reason.

Changed the design so that it would print vertically and… still failure, but a different kind this time. Turns out I set the pause too high and the slot for the NFC tag had already been closed up when printing.

First attempt at designing and printing the physical albums with a pause to insert the NFC chip did not go well.

Going to try again with a slightly greater depth to see if the 3d printing software will magically try to build a bridge over the tag rather than printing filament directly onto it

I miss having physical media. The nostalgia of taking a CD off a shelf, putting it into a CD player, and listening to the whole album straight through has imprinted itself upon me, like a permanent set of rose-tinted glasses.
Spotify and other services provide all the world's music, but the convenience is such that I don't often sit and listen to an album with full concentration. Not in the same way that I've heard people do when putting on an actual vinyl record. For me, at least, act of music appreciation begins with the ritual of choosing a physical album from a finite collection.

The goal of this project, then, is to replicate as much of that process as is reasonable. I'm hoping it evolves to become more elaborate and involved over time, but we start simple:

A collection of 3D printed discs, complete with album-art stickers on the front and an NFC disc inside which, when scanned, will load up the corresponding album on whatever device scans it.

To start, the scanner will simply be a phone, and the NFC tag will simply open the album or song in Spotify / YouTube Music / whatever.

Eventually I'd like to create a standalone physical player that reads the discs and broadcasts the album on a wireless and / or bluetooth set of speakers somewhere without needing to have a phone.

Also, ideally, I'd have the albums loaded locally from a NAS instead of having to reach out to a 3rd-party service, but... we'll get there.