RPi-Jukebox-RFID VS snapdroid

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.

It's all done with Mopidy + Snapcast. Mopidy has various frontends, but the Iris web frontend supports Snapcast and can be controlled from any web-capable device; it can be used to assign/change device groups, assign certain streams to certain groups (you can have multiple sources playing on multiple devices/groups and control them from there), etc. I also used the Snapdroid app, which will allow you to adjust things like latency, individual device volumes and stream volumes, etc on your phone or tablet. Beyond that, you can integrate Home Assistant and pretty much get it to act however you want, including being fully controlled via voice on both Google and Amazon (and ultimately Cortana, ick) platforms. Of course that takes some setting up that some wouldn't consider "easy", so YMMV.

* Server running mopidy [1] with all your audio loaded up on it and connected to Spotify.

* Install the Iris plugin for UI [2] on server

* Install snapcast [3] server on the audio server and snapcast client on raspberry pi's near all stereos you want to pipe audio into

* Put bookmarks to the Iris page on all family member's phone home screens.

* Add the snapdroid app [4] to each phone so people can adjust volume of each stereo and also play audio on their phone (or anything it's bluetoothed into)

[1] https://mopidy.com/

[2] https://mopidy.com/ext/iris/

[3] https://github.com/badaix/snapcast

[4] https://github.com/badaix/snapdroid

The Snapdroid app for Android is pretty basic. AFAIK there still isn't a UI for iOS.