chamomile

Wool and wool accessories

Pronounced "kæməmil"


Large sheep the size of a small sheep! Likes tea, DIY, and nerd stuff. Sysadmin, release engineer and programmer by trade.


Personal Website
bleatspeak.net/

nycki
@nycki

imagine. you're at a concert and the music slaps. you go to the merch table and they have little foil-wrapped card packs, like for trading card games. you buy one and open it and it's got a card for every song on the album, with the lyrics on one side and some art on the other. and, right there in the foil pack, is a little paper sleeve with the album cover on it. and inside the sleeve is a memory card with DRM-free music files! you can put the music on your phone, and then you can put the memory card back in its sleeve and put the whole shebang in a card binder to show off at home.

seriously, if you do this please tell me. you can call it packet tracks or maybe something better, I don't know lol. I just think its wild that we can put music on something as thin as a card and I think that this would be an incredible way to distribute physical copies of music with album art. Playing cards are just slightly smaller than cassette tapes and we put album art on those!

ooh oooh oooooh and you could literally shuffle your playlists. I am a visionary.

edit: I made a printer template so you can go do this right now!


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in reply to @nycki's post:

You'd have to do some math to see if it's feasible for a typical song, but instead of a memory card, it might be feasible to print encoded data to be scanned in through a camera. It's on my mind (rather than a QR code, which probably takes too much space) because I randomly found a proof of concept called Paperbak in my bookmarks, the other day...

I considered this! I had a Nintendo e-Reader back in the day and those did something similar... I remember it could fit a full NES game on 10 card-edge codes. If you put those all on a single card somehow, that's about 40 kB to play with. I'm checking my audio library now and it looks like a two-minute song is around 2,000 kB (flac) or 1,000 kB (mp3). So I don't think thats happening any time soon. At best you could encode a midi remix.

I actually saw back in... 2014-15, I think? A band distributing albums at a show on these credit card USB drives - I think they're pretty good, little expensive to get printed (small batches they're half the retail price of the album or more) but they included FLAC and VBR MP3 as well as high-quality cover art, the booklet PDF, and some other goodies (with tons of space leftover, too - you could easily include video features right on the "album" with this format, like a live album that includes the concert footage). If you were packing cards with them as bonuses, the credit card form factor is a little smaller than a playing card but probably not enough to be a big deal?

HECK YEAH!!!! That's another good way to do it! Paper is probably cheaper for small batches but you could make some pretty pro looking album art on one of those business card thingies!