Over the years we’ve featured many projects which attempt to replicate the feel of physical media when playing music. Usually this involves some kind of token representation of the media, but here’s [Bas] with a different twist (Dutch language, Google Translate link). He’s using the CDs themselves in their cases, identifying them by their barcodes.
At its heart is a Raspberry Pi Pico W and a barcode scanner — after reading the barcode, the Pi calls Discogs to find the tracks, and then uses the Spotify API to find the appropriate links. From there, Home Assistant forwards them along to a smart speaker for playback. As a nice touch, [Bas] designed a 3D printed holder for the electronics which makes the whole thing a bit neater to use.
We this approach for its relative simplicity, and because the real CDs ad the retro touch it’s a real winner. You can find all the resources in a GitHub repository, should you wish to make your own. Meanwhile, it’s certainly not the first barcode scanner we’ve seen.
It’s an interesting implementation, but why would you implement it this way, supporting Spotify and generating unnecessary traffic for data you already have locally?
I was about to comment exactly this. If you have the physical CD, why use Spotify? I would much rather rip the disc and put it on NAS and have it play locally using VLC or something.
Well if you are like me and have a box full of CD´s somewhere around but not a player/drive.
I dont even know anyone who still has one.
A nice way to get a bit of nostalgic feeling. I mean, yeah a rip would be 100 times better. But we are on HaD…. how much of the stuff we build really is useful outside of “its fun”
At that point you might as well find a lossless rip somewhere, then you aren’t dealing with Spotify and you don’t need to rip it.
heh once i realized all my cds were destined for a dusty box in the basement, i ripped them all while i still could. sad to imagine people missed that window.
anyways, i guess this is a hack: i figured out how to have a cd/dvd-rom still working in 2024. the trick is just, get an external one (USB). that’s all it takes. for the like 7 years that i used cds every day, i would go through internal cd-rom drives about one a year. then just by dumb luck i happened to buy an external drive at the end of that era , and it is still working fine, and i use it about once a week (to rip newly-purchased cds, how’s that for nostalgia!).
i assume the mechanism is that an internal drive always has dust flowing through it because of the case ventilation. but the external one just sits there without filtering air for the rest of your pc.
Huh? You’re talking about disc drives like they’re impossible to find…they’re all over Amazon starting at about 30 bucks for a Blu-ray burner which is perfectly capable of reading a CD as well.
Not hard to buy a drive to rip them. Presumably a USB DVD drive can.
Now and then I’ve found USB CD or DVD drive at Goodwill. Try those and rip the CD to NAS box and use those.
Amazon? I just bought one a year ago. CDs are still very much alive.
Apparently the Gen alpha and Gen z set first repopularized phonograph records, then they were bringing back cassette tapes, and in the past year or two, CDs have been making a comeback. So just ask a 14-24 year old to borrow their CD player.
I mean, I recently bought a portable CD/DVD rom device expressly to digitize old media to a home server, so you can still get them if you want one. They are pretty inexpensive, like less than $30 if I remember correctly.
What hacker threw away CD players or drives??? I have been hoarding far less useful stuff.
Don’t want to maintain a NAS, and deal with the electricity bill (which is expensive in the Netherlands).
Just because it’s possible….
And by using Spotify, you can generate again a tiny amount of money for the artist (that is, if you already bought the physical CD)
Haven’t thought of it like this, but i do like that idea!
Exactly. Also, it would be nice to see “unclouding” hacks regulary, on how to force your property work without any third-party control. From Alexa, IP cameras and similar things to robotic vacuum cleaners and all that IoT stuff. Today you have to do a lot of search, sometimes with cheating search engines to find out what things on the market you could buy, hack/reflash/modify and finally own.
“Unclouding” could become trendy in the near future, if not already.
Oh this project can easily be reimplemented virtually cloud free. But i didn’t want to :).
Lol, really? You can’t see how it’s magnitudes easier to just match a UPC to a tracklist then retrieve that from the Spotify API, instead of having to rip every single CD yourself, then build and maintain a local database? You can’t see how this makes it a lot easier for people to reproduce the experiment themselves?
Why stop at a NAS too? Why “support” Big Hard Drive and Big PC Case? Why not build your own hard drives out of iron ore and bauxite?
haha different strokes, man.
some people find spotify easy to use. i don’t. i used it for a month in 2011 and i found so many frustrations. deep frustrations that made me unable to hear the music i wanted to hear, and shallow frustrations that simply made me angry even though it would eventually play the music. now my wife has installed it on the android tv and i find some of the same old frustrations are still there, and there are new frustrations too. and sometimes, even she is frustrated!
and on the other hand, my own mp3 collection, i find very easy to use. yes, there is work to collect it, rip it, index it. but that minimal work is easy to justify because i always get the result i expect. and that is also the result i desire. so it is a good day for me. of course, no matter how frustrated wife gets with spotify, she is not very keen on my mp3 collection (or hers, either).
my point isn’t that spotify is bad but that some people will find it hard to use, and others will find it easy to use. a combination of different needs and different aptitudes and different expectations.
Indeed, to each their own. I quite enjoy Spotify, searching etc. My partner doesn’t and wants the ‘album’ experience. Well, now we have both worlds.
To each their own, and I appreciate you having a nuanced opinion but I think you might want to be more open minded to the idea that software might have gotten better in a decade and a half.
I can’t think of anything that I used in 2011 that I could still judge in 2024. ls hasn’t changed significantly I guess, so I can list files the same way.
This comment is asinine as hell. Local media is almost always better than streaming from a service that can change their catalog at will, with the two major caveats being power usage being higher and no new media entering the ecosystem without the user seeking it out.
“Maintaining” a music database is nothing; set up proper ID3 tags once and they will stay valid; I haven’t had to maintain anything about my collection in over a decade.
Reducing alumina ore from bauxite consumes vast amounts of electricity. There already has been enough iron and aluminum extracted from the earth that much “production” is via recycling these metals.
If you can discover a simple method of reducing Titanium oxide to Titanium and also cobbled some sand into MOS6502 processors you could make yourself a bunch of Terminators to send it back in time to prevent the parents of the people that formed ASCAP, BMI, Metallica, DMCA from ever meeting. This would allow us to have a timeline where original Napster still exists and have an open source, universally available, free music cloud with every song and remix that ever existed in all the parallel universes.
Oh there are a million ways to do this. Some will be better or worse. I did it ‘my way’ because i have zero interest to actually rip all the CDs and store the data locally. I don’t really care about ‘generating traffic’, my 5g connection to the home is responsive and fast enough. And i don’t mind Spotify: i actually quite like it. For me this works.
But the main reason it was hacked together like this:
This project is a small fun gift for my partner, and i didn’t want to spend many more hours on it.
“We this approach for its relative simplicity”
Typo? Missing a “like”, maybe?
“real CDs ad the retro touch”
My physical CD player doesn’t play ads. It also plays all the tracks on the CD including the ones that the internet has forgotten about.
(it happened to a friend of mine who embraces all this new-fangled “modern” way to listen to music, that Spotify just removed songs that were on his playlist. That never happens with physical media. Now get off my lawn!)
(and I once called a radio station to wish for a song and they said they didn’t have it even though it’s on the same album as another song from the same artist that they play up&down every day)
However I must say that this device would make archiving your huge collection of CDs and making a track list an absolute snap.
Back when i regularly ‘ripped’ my own CDs the track listing etc was already automatically identified and embedded, don’t see what a barcode reader would help.
Proof that something we’d call AI has been calling the shots on radio and the music industry since the radio’s early days. The last underground radio station disappeared by the summer of ’75 and I’ve turned the rest off except community radio. Those stations-programs are # 1 in my “playlist” still making new music happen only now I have the whole world to tune into. No buddy Spotify.
Surfing the radio world since the 50’s.
My spotify doesn’t play ads either :) But yes, the integrity of the library is not always desirable.
If I were to do this. I’m sure there would be so much of it that isn’t on Spotify or discogs
We have a few of those! Most of it was on the discogs side: a typo in a barcode (we pushed a change on the discogs), a missing barcode (added it). Yesterday we had one album which was named differently on Discogs than on Spotify. Discogs is correct, Spotify wrong. Not sure yet what i’ll do there.
A long time ago I had a novel idea for selecting and playing CD’s with a remote control. The Idea is to print out all album art and hang it on the wall. On the opposite wall there is a webcam. The remote control is a simple laser pointer modified to blink at some specific rate. So you point the laser pointer at a specific CD and hold it there for few seconds, the webcam picks up the blinking dot and from it’s location, it knows which CD it is.
In between the CD’s you can also make buttons for things like Play / Pause / Skip, and more elaborate functions such as “Clear Playlist” and “Add album to playlist”.
I’m curious of what will happen if you point it at some real objects like a trashcan.
Then it just plays from the Taylor Swift catalog…
LOL!
Nickelback is added to your cue
I love this concept. We have way too many CDs for that though (or maybe just too small a wall).
Hello? CD’s sound great compared to .mp3/base streaming services. Plus physical media is cool. I have old concert Tix from the 80s and 90s stuffed into mine.
I built something similar using ESPHome and Home Assistant https://www.andrewherrington.com/album-barcode-scanner/
Cool! You went way past my ‘hack it together in an afternoon’-level of projet though :)
Bookmarked!
B^)
This is so strange. If you have the CDs, you could just plug in a CD player instead of this bizarre roundabout cloud thing and it would be better in every way.
Now make a bunch of laminated index cards that have the album art and barcode on them. store them all in a nice box. Much smaller and easier to flip through.
Reminds me of flipping through the disks in the store back in the day.
You people are all overthinking it. It’s got googly eyes. That makes it great. Simple as that!