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RFID Music Player
frazzydee writes "I know what you're thinking, RFID tags used to play music? Well, it turns out that we don't need to take out our tinfoil hats this time, because it turns out that are some constructive uses for the same RFID tags that we have all come to loathe. Since RFID tags can hold 1 kilobyte of data, somebody who goes by dividuum found that (s)he could use the tags combined with a reader to store and play back music. Dividuum used SID files- the same format used on Commodore 64s- and programmed everything in C. Pictures of the RFID device are available here."
the same RFID tags that we have all come to loathe
I don't subscribe to slashdot groupthink.
I don't loathe any technology, only those that abuse it.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Sounds about perfect for that song that is all silence.
Only some of the potential uses.
I used an RFID card to get in and out of a city admin building all last week on site, it was much better than having to fumble for a different key for the umpteen different doors.
Technophobic dorks. Invasion of privacy, and all the other paranoias you have are all social problems, not technical ones.
Don't bitch about the tech, bitch about the people who would misuse it.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Outside of the slashdot tin-foil hat crowd, I don't think anybody is getting really worked up over glorified barcodes.
It's just a technology like just about everything else. It doesn't automatically make it evil just because some bad guys might use it or there is "potential" for abuse.
Seriously, the RFID is evil meme is dead. Learn to deal with it.
1 Kb doesn't seem like a lot of music. 1 Mb/min is the usal rate for at least decent encodings. That means that 1Kb would play ... 1/1024 min or approx .05 seconds. Ouch
Philosophy.
At least they credit someone named "Dividuum" rather than calling him "RFID software guy".
Trolling is a art,
Will it play Ogg?
Since RFID tags can hold 1 kilobyte of data, somebody who goes by dividuum found that (s)he could use the tags combined with a reader to store and play back music. Great! If I had like three thousand I can actually play a entire track, give the RIAA a convenient way to track me, and I'll probably get some sort of prostate cancer! Awesome!
Search Engine Optimization Tool
Ha! You won't fool me! You're just trying to get me to take off my Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie! Well, it won't work! I've had voices in my head a lot louder than you try! So if you think that you'll---
What? OK, Mom. I'll go take my meds now.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Use your head. Since each tag holds a whole 1Kb, you only need 1024 tags for each minute of music. That's a mere 716800 tags for a full cd. Since you'd be buying in bulk, you can replace those flimsy, akward cds for just $7168.00 apiece! I don't know about you, but I'm going right now!
Coralized pictures link
And the main site too (if you can read it)
You know folks tin foil and aluminum foil are VERY different things.
I amazed that a site so full of educated geeks has never pointed this out.
Apple comes out with 40 gb iPod.........
:P
Okay, someone used an RFID reader/writer to put 1k of music on, it, big whoop. Next week I'm planning on putting some MP3s on my usb flash drive, isn't that great...
if the music is going to be low quality jingles i believe we can all deal with this....
carry EMP devices into stores which use RFID and let loose
Check journal for info on Anti-TextBook, an idea by me.
more like this site was hosted on a rfid tag am i rite?
The information technology which kept police states like the USSR, Third Reich, and Saddam's Iraq going was good 'ol fashioned paper. Written records of people's history and whereabouts don't sound as nasty but they were plenty effective.
I do hate it when someone takes it on themselves to speak for everyone... why they couldn't have said 'which many have come to loathe' or 'which many have privacy concerns over' etc.
Personally I think they're kinda cool... and coming from a data and human interaction focused business such as I am in, the things they can do to the betterment of people's experiences of things is supurb.
And now WWRD's Avante Garde corner features Herr Gerder VonStiffle's latest composition, "Fast Walk Through Walmart's Sporting Goods Section, #7"
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
pics are getting slashdotted... :( someone get a mirror going plz :(
anyway, this is the first application of RFID that ive seen that doesnt make me cringe.
sure tracking on large shipments of cargo i understand. other than that...no thanks.. i don't really want it to replace the barcode.
later...
Some interesting Commodore 64 music links:-
The HVSID Collection - Which is the main site for the collection of thousands upon thousands of Commodore 64 sid files.
Remix.kwed.org Remixes of Commodore 64 tunes with real and modern synthesized instruments.
(Don't hammer their servers!)
I'm off to play "Lazy Jones" (aka ZombieNation)
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
I get my own theme music!
You used "it turns out" in two sentences which are next to each other. This is an example of redundant data, so I wouldn't go storing your /. posts on rfid's.
Q: Why?
A: Because.
Q: But that's not enough of a reason.
A: Yes, it is.
Q: But it's so useless.
A: Shut the fuck up and go play Pokemon, would you?
---
Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
Resistance is futile, etc, etc.
Your site is about to get slashdotted as it appears on www.slashdot.com :-).
Posted by Slashdot at March 23, 2005 01:14 AM
When they released The Phantom Mennance movies flood of toys. Dident they release some action figures with RDF stuff? Put them on a base. They speak dialog.
Not sure if it was inside of the little plastic base or they loaded the player and tages it by what was places on it.
I would like a system where you have a reader plugged into a stero system and an ethernet cable (or wifi). Then you would go and buy or somehow get a tag, you scan the tag, and it downloads and plays the music. Some tags will have playlists too. Some of the tags from the Big 5 would be linked to the first reader they are scanned, other tags could be traded, but you would still need the physical tag to play the song.
"Love is like a trampoline, first it's like "SWEET!!" then it's like *BLAMM!*"
Take it easy - I'm from 1980 myself and employing ironic humor
Whoa, you're from 1980? I heard it's nice there; lots of coke and sex, like a constant party. But I just haven't had the time myself to visit. Welcome to 2005!
I think very few people know what RFID is, so it isn't meaningful to judge if most people are "getting worked up" over RFID.
Your examination leaves much to be desired, besides. RFID gives us opportunities to do things (including tracking at a short distance and publishing uniquely coded RFID tags) which we couldn't do with barcodes, so RFID is not fairly described as "glorified barcodes". Calling it "just a technology" and "evil" reads like an attempt to marginalize anyone's ethical critique of RFID rather than engaging in fruitful rational discussion of how it works and what the social implications are. Hardly the work of someone presenting insight for others to glean.
Given this, I think your post is quite overrated (currently at +2 insightful).
Digital Citizen
What we, white man? --As said by Tonto
Problems are like gifts, it's better to give than to receive
http://www.soultracks.com/commodores.htm
... are the tiny chunks of Ruby code that read and write RFID tags using a standard chunk of hardware and libusb.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I know this is slightly off topic, but it occurred to me that RFID tags could actually be useful in terms of music.
The value of music (or video, or software, or any other intellectual property) isn't so much in the media it's stored on, but in owning the license to legally play it. As it stands, when somebody purchases music, be it on a CD or in mp3 format, maintaining the license to the work can be a pain.
CDs can break or be scratched to the point of being unplayable. Hard drives can be erased accidentally. Owners of the copy write do their best to prevent users to copy media because despite many users otherwise benign intent to transfer media to a different format or to archive owned media, there is no guarantee that they aren't copying the work for a more nefarious purpose.
Enter RFIDs. They're cheap, there portable and they can be owned. A person simply purchases the RFID for a work, and then that RFID is scanned any player in any format before the work can be played.
Taking your mp3 player filled with music you own on vacation? Simply wave it over your box of RFID tags, and viola! The player knows you are legally entitled to play the songs you copied onto it.
You could make as many perfect digital copies as you like of your CDs or even DVDs and it wouldn't matter. As long as the player is able to check the RFID tag for ownership, the media will play.
Granted there are some problems. As they are small, RFID tags would be easy to lose, and all sorts of issues come up when you consider online purchase of media where physical objects like RFIDs can't be used. But it's an idea, nonetheless.
The Internet is generally stupid
No it isn't.
OK. I have to know. Was the (sic) a joke, or do you really not know hoe to spell amazed? Or what sic means?
Slashdot - Mutual Assured Discussion
You've been brainwashed. RFID tags rock. They kill barcodes and they can do all kinds of cool shit. I'm not sure where you get this "we all loathe them" crap. That's pretty funny though.
Phidgets is a company that sells these RFID readers and tags in an "off the shelf" manner. For a mere $90 CDN (almost nothing in USD), you can get a reader plus a whole set of tags (and of course the software to program against it with).
This technology is so stupidly cheap some toy company is going to jump all over this.
dont bitch about the bomb, bitch about who dropped it !!! and so on and on and on. Technology and misuse are going to kill us
"Since RFID Tags can hold 1Kb of Data?"
Not all tags are that small, my company makes a series of tags that hold a *considerably* larger data package.
128K and up...
Wow. You really aren't very good at this troll thing. I'll give you a couple hints: try to obfuscate the link to the shock site at least a little. And maybe actually write something that doesn't look like the string of text that v1@gr@ ads carry at the end in order to defeat bayesian filtering.
God, it's like you're not even trying. I bet that if I met you in real life I'd say "Wow. He's almost as smart as a bag full of wet mice."
I've been looking into buying an RFID chip setup for tagging animals, in this case pythons and boas.
It would be interesting to not only tag the animals with an identifiable number, but create a tonal signature that would play back when the animal is scanned.
Someone at PETA just put my name on a shoot-to-kill list.
I picture Old NSA-Bob working the crowd, gathering who is at the local 2600-meeting using their under-the-skin-RFID-tags.
Suddenly, from nowere, his spook-gadgets emits strange sounds.
Yes! Its "Popcorn"!
While it's ajoke on slashdot to say "Imagine a beowulfcluster of those", in this case, it could actually make sense.
Since those tags are produced en masse and you will get them whenever you buy (in the future), it will become trivial to get a huge bunch of them in a short time. Find a way to link them, and you could use them for building your own supercomputer.
Well, ok, you'll need all your walls covered by them, probably...though I once read they envisaged 16kb per tag, which would make it not all that farfetched.
Regardless, sooner or later some nerd will use it for creating his home-made weirdobox.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
my prefered tool for compressing celine dion tracks is rm.
And no, I'm not talking about 1337 case modders or overclockers. I'm talking about real hackers like this one. Doing hardware and software hacks that are done just for the sheer joy of doing them, and can be done because they CAN.
Mod me down as flamebait if you will. This is something very cool. Who the hell cares if it's practical. Neither is a machine that can turn ordinary dog biscuits into india ink. But the hack value is enormous.
(tip o' the pin to Bill Griffith... thanks, Griffy!)
I suspect it will be smaller too.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
YFI. It's a script. That's why it doesn't make a lick of sense.
Sleep is futile.
I'm waiting for someone to come up with a write once chip for storing music on. Something like a cheap flash card memory card constructed of silicon fuses. Generic at the time of manufacture before writing to keep the cost/chip down. Think about it. No moving parts, tiny power consumption, small size, could be built to have huge reliablity. Hmmm huge reliabilty naa they'll never make it.
Philip
Signatures are broken
But what about just sampling all the tags in one's environment and playing the results as audio? It's got to be at least as good as many of the last century's attempts to redefine music. You could get some nice wind-chime or aeolian-harp effects, or something.
The COMMTech chip technology used in Star Wars action figures?
Scroll down to bottom
Chip H.
We got that here in Canada. It's called a radio.
printf($randomline(sigs.txt) \n "-- "$randomline(authors.txt));
-- myself
We suspect you are are pirating the random noise that that is superior to the CDs found in our electronics section.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
We have NEVER needed tin foil hats for RFID!
/. Chicken Little construct.
/.'s ability to create a universe of FUD all on it's own.
/. only "worlds" can we find that exist nowhere in the light if logic, evidence and sanity?
Every real use of RFID tags so far has been COMPLETELY legit.
The idea that "RFID" == "Evil" is a pure
The fact that the construct is now so pervsive that people need to preface new RFID articles with "no need for the tin foil hat" says volumes about
Lets play a game, what other
RFID lets me get in and out of my workplace by waving my wallet around next to the door. When it's coffin-shaped with a black rose on it, any excuse to wave it around is good with me!
Do you see what I did there?
If you had a powerful enough RF receiver would you be done for unauthorised copying by the music industry?