Shuffle Duck

So I was talking with my house mate Dave this morning about music, and how when he gets his own place he likes the idea of having all of his music on show again, rather than just using his music library on his computer. Apparently one of the side effects of no longer using CDs is that he no longer really listens to full albums any more, and tends to just listen to particular songs, or just leave the music library on some play list or shuffle.

This got me thinking, what if there was some sort of half way house between the two? A way of having the CDs out for display and using them to play albums etc, but at the same time using the digital copies of the file so that they don’t get scratched and damaged when you are taking them in and out of the cases, or if you heaven forbid just put the CD that was in the player on the side while you play a different album.

So the plan, if I ever get around to it is to use an RFID reader, embedded into some sort of surface (either the top of a music player, or possibly even a table top) and hide RFID tags into the CD cases. Then when you place the CD onto the reader, it can start to play the album through some speakers, simple enough plan. Here is where the name comes in, so i was explaining to Dave that RFID tags could be (and largely have been) embedded into just about anything now, and that tags could also be programmed to do other tasks, such as play all the music on shuffle. Dave liked the idea of having an item that could be used to shuffle something that could look like something else, and for some reason the idea of shuffle being a duck popped into his head and decided to bed itself in.

No guarantees I will get any further with this idea, but it seems like an easy enough thing to do from a hardware standpoint at least, but only time will tell if the idea of a shuffle duck takes it root in my head too.