I’ve been working on a little project that aims to bring some physicality back to my digital music. I don’t miss managing shelves full of CDs or tapes or vinyl. I really don’t. There came a point in my life where my relationship with physical media was unhealthy. And to combat that, I shifted to a perfectly sane and healthy digital media obsession. At the very least, I no longer have a couple dozen shelves full of books, vinyl, CDs, tapes, magazines, and more. Now, I have a file server. It lives in the store room.
But the one thing I really miss, especially with vinyl, is flipping through my albums and looking for something I want to listen to. There was something nice about thumbing through the album covers, looking at the art, and choosing which one to put on the turntable. I’d kinda like to get that back, preferably without the acquisition of vinyl.
Apple Music is my platform of choice when it comes to tunes. They’ve got a better track record of having all the weird stuff I want to listen to, specifically Quebecois trad and Celtic folk. Now, I’ve read a few articles about how someone created cards that use NFC chips where you can scan the chip and it’ll launch a streaming service and play the album. Nice, but I have two problems with that:
- The cards were small.
- NFC chips seem like an overkill solution to this problem because…
Barcodes exist.
I’m a systems librarian. I have a 2D barcode scanner and the expertise to use it. So why should I bother with an NFC chip? I don’t need to buy barcodes, I can make them programmatically. I don’t want small cards, I want something around US Letter sized. Part of the desire of flipping through albums was to look at the cool cover art, right? So I thought, hey… maybe I can write some code that could generate a card, with cover art, a background, and a 2D barcode capable of handling an Apple Music URI (music://).
So I did that, and yes, I had help from an AI. If that’s offensive to you, I understand. I wish I were a better coder, but I’m not. At the end of the day, Claude keeps me off Stack Exchange and I’m grateful for that. I’m not trying to write something that anyone should ever pay money for and, when I think this is ready for others to use, I’ll open up the repo and anyone can have a play with it.
Anyway, the current workflow is simple:
- Copy the URL for an album in Apple Music.
- Paste it into a text box on the website.
- The site queries the MusicBrainz API and uses the cover art archive to snag the front cover of the album.
- The site creates a PDF, suitable for printing, that features the cover and an enlarged, blurred image of the cover for the background. Underneath that cover is a PDF417 barcode that contains the URL of the album in Apple Music.
- Print the card.
- Open up a little app in macOS and scan the barcode.
- Apple Music pulls up the album and you can start listening.
I can probably fit a couple thousand of these cards in a file box, organizing them just like you would vinyl in a crate. I can handle a file box or two a helluva lot easier than shelves full of vinyl. It brings back a bit of discovery, where I can find an old favourite and think, yeah I haven’t listened to that in a while! Let’s put that on! More than that, I’m listening to an album. Not a single song. Not a playlist. I’m listening to the whole thing and I didn’t have to scroll endlessly to find it.
But I did have to look for it, and that’s part of the fun.
I call this project FizikaCard. It’s mostly PHP with a little Python. Graphics manipulation is handled by ImageMagick. The whole thing runs on a standard Linux web stack and since I’m old, I’m using a good ol’ LAMP setup. I’m pretty happy with the initial results, but I have a few things I’d like to add and tweak just to make it a little bit better.
