RPi-Jukebox-RFID VS mt32-pi

I casually accumulated parts to build a Phoniebox over the last year but neglected to keep up with the project page to see that libspotify was shut down. I have a Pi Zero W and MiniAmp hat, speakers, RC522 board, pretty much everything except some nice arcade buttons, but I pivoted to an ESPHome-based project with an ESP8266 and RC522 getting pulled into Home Assistant as an entity. That's as far as I got with it, now I'm taking a step back. I'm open to anything as long as it lets my kid tap an NFC card and play music somewhere. Could be an internal hardwired speaker, could be Bluetooth, could be cast to a Google Home Mini. The important part is that there's a kid-friendly box with an RC522 and some simple control buttons. Everything after that, I'm flexible.

My GF didn’t want to get rid of her old CDs despite never listening to any of them. So I built her a Phonie Box and RFID tagged all of her CDs. She loved it and actually expanded her CD collection because of it. It feels a bit like magic just putting a CD, book or whatever you tagged on the box and it starts playing the album/audiobook/Spotify playlist

I have this idea of building a toy (wooden) vinyl player for my daughter. I love vinyl, so does she - but is still too young (3 years) to handle it properly, so I want this wooden vinyl player to take on wooden discs that I put an RFID chip in, and then the RaspberryPi inside the vinyl player recognizes that chip via an RFID-reader and gets some music playing. I worked out the latter part (Phoniebox ftw) but need advice on how to best get a child-proof mechanism in order to get the wooden discs spinning.

Maybe look into the Phoniebox project on Github? I built one a while ago using a raspberry pie and while I am not a programmer the software does for me exactly what you describe. I scan a tag and it then plays the spotify album

The 3d printed parts are my own design, the electronics and software are all from: https://github.com/MiczFlor/RPi-Jukebox-RFID.

I have just seen https://github.com/dwhinham/mt32-pi but it doesn't seem as easy to play with and well-documented as the other software I've used.

Cool system. I'd see if you can get a hold of a Roland MT-32 type synth. If your sound card has a daughterboard connector (it does, top right corner) you can get a Serdaco Wavetable board which would let you have generalMIDI output. An external MT-32 or a mt32-pi will also greatly improve your music output.

Regardless the best option is a MT32-pi solution. https://github.com/dwhinham/mt32-pi/wiki/Custom-hardware

I think MT-32 and SC-55, at least, are wildly overpriced for what they are from a music perspective, thanks to the retro gaming bubble. If you want to mess around with one, I would recommend checking out mt32-pi. In addition to the extremely limited MT-32 sound palette, it can also load soundfonts, which really opens things up a lot.

Check out Mini-Dexed and MT32-Pi. I use both and they're great. They are built on the bare-metal "circle" platform, so they don't run on top of linux (so no faffing about with JACK routing, etc.).

its a CJMCU 5102 DAC Board, which is one of the supported soundcards. You can use the internal headphone jack of the Pi as well, however it only supports 12bit PWM audio there, which is usable but has a lot of artifacts and I would not recommend therefore

You can turn a Raspberry Pi into a Yamaha DX7 using MiniDexed or a Roland MT-32 using mt32-pi (which also loads soundfonts via FluidSynth). I use both of these regularly. They're great. Both work with USB MIDI controllers with no additional hardware required and boot headlessly in a few seconds to work like a true instrument.