Play record covers instead of vinyl

Play record covers instead of vinyl

Arduino Team — July 21, 2022

In 2020, for the first time since the 1980s, sales of vinyl records exceeded those of CDs. Digital music - especially streaming - has largely overtaken both, but the popularity of vinyl records has increased while the popularity of CDs has declined. That's because the analog sound of vinyl adds a dimension that many find enjoyable, and because there's something appealing about the tangible act of putting a record on. In a fun twist, students at the LDLC school in France have come up with a new way to put on a record: by inserting the record cover instead of the vinyl.

Students Ibrahima, Scott, Antoine and Arthur came across an old Arduino project that their teacher, Jean Noël, created years ago. He converted a "slot-in" record player to accept record covers instead of vinyl. But it would still play the right music, thanks to RFID. An RFID tag on the record sleeve would trigger an Arduino inside the record player to queue the correct playlist on an SD card. The Arduino would then play the music through an Adafruit Music Maker MP3 shield connected to a 7W mono amplifier.

As part of Hackaday's Hack it Back contest, the students decided to relaunch their teacher's project. Although the general concept and much of the material remained, the students made some improvements. They added an RGB LCD screen that displays current music information and also rewrote the Arduino sketch to make it easier to update playlists without reflashing the Uno. If they win the Hackaday competition, the student team plans to develop a hardware kit that will make it easy for others to tackle similar RFID music projects.