I've built this exact thing last year! https://www.dinofizzotti.com/blog/2020-02-05-diskplayer-usin...

Thank you internet! This is really cool, just like I pictured it :)

My living room RPi based music solution is an old Grundig radio from the 50s, modified so I can control the volume using the actual volume control. Playback sources (currently online radio stations chosen by genre) can be switched using the physical buttons. The "off" button shuts down the Pi.

Maybe I'll do a writeup on my blog sometime, in case people would be interested...

For your idea, you could do what a lot of kids toys do, where they have a "cartridge" (puzzle piece, alphabet letter, whatever) which has some notches, so it pushes a combo of switches to select what sound to play

Could also do it with barcodes

i did this with toggle switches in my car, and they're binary, so the 4 gave me 16 options... per mode, i had a mode button too, in radio mode it was either podcasts, a few SDR options, and a few mp3 music genres

then i decided the toggle switches were gonna get embedded in my face if i got in a wreck so i took them out ... there's a reason all the buttons in cars are round and plastic, I guess.

Now I want to build a floppy drive into my car, and each 3.5" disk would be an "album" - of course it would just be a cartridge that the system would recognize to play a particular set of files which are stored internally.

It would amuse my friends on car trips, not that I have any of those...

I see a problem tho, the floppy don't go nicely with the car enviroment and they will probably become unreadable pretty fast.

I had a similar idea but i wanted to embed small nfc tag into some floppy disk and use a broken floppy reader that i own with a tag reader inside the gut of the reader reusing only the eject mechanism and the led, (i will be missing the nice motor noise tough...).

I'm also experimenting with other cartridge-style meccanism

Echoes of FlashPath (have one somewhere):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlashPath

It is an adapter that takes flash cards (e.g. SmartMedia) and can be used in 3.5" drives.

I planned to do that with old 64 MiB or 128 MiB SD cards and a car radio with SD support: One SD card = one album.

However, nobody still makes SD cards this small, and using a 16 GiB card for 1 album seems wasteful :)

But floppy disks would be much nicer.

Try aliexpress you can bulk buy 4gb ones for about a dollar each.

We would be friends. Any pics?

My Covid-project has actually been building exactly this -- except with QR-codes on cards and a dedicated reader. Still in mockup stage, but I really like the prospect of not having to pop out the phone (and inadvertently get distracted) every time I have to interact with my music-system.

There was a nice Sonos enabled Pi based music player with a NFC card UI written up last year.[1]

[1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/who-needs-vinyl-records-whe...

I've seen some neat Home Assistant-based projects with this concept as well!

You could a mix tapes of sorts. Love this idea.

USB sticks?

NFC tags too