Plastic Player Combines Digital Tunes with the Joy of Loading Cassettes

For young people, sifting through a digital music library probably comes naturally. But, for those of us who grew up with music on physical media, modern services like Spotify leave something to be desired. Of course, there is no denying the usefulness of music streaming, so what’s a nostalgic music lover to do?

One option is to build Brendan Dawes’ Plastic Player 2, which merges the benefits of digital music streaming with the tactile appeal of physical media. Plastic Player 2 looks like a well-designed Bluetooth speaker that wouldn’t appear out of place at your local electronics store. But, packed inside is some really interesting functionality.

The heart of Plastic Player 2 is a Raspberry Pi running the MusicBox image, which uses the Mopidy server to stream music from a variety of services. But, the real magic is handled by an Espruino. That has an NFC reader, which is triggered by small plastic cartridges with NFC stickers and 35mm photographic slides.

When a cartridge is placed in the Plastic Player 2, the Espruino uses NFC to gather its ID. If that ID is already registered, the corresponding music is played. If it’s not recognized, the ID is displayed on a small Adafruit SPI OLED screen, so it can be setup to play a new song, artist, album, or playlist.