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src/notes/2024-08-27-20-44-49.md

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+---
+date: '2024-08-27T20:44:49+02:00'
+location: Stockholm, Sweden
+timezone: Europe/Stockholm
+description: |
+    We just received our Yoto Mini player for our three year old daughter. It’s basically like a modern cassette player, but more hitech and with a business model.
+keywords:
+    - yoto
+    - audiobooks
+    - podcasts
+    - stories
+tags:
+    - kids
+---
+We just received our [Yoto Mini player](https://eu.yotoplay.com) for our three year old daughter. It's basically like a modern cassette player, but more hitech and with a business model.
+
+The daughter has been enjoying listening to stories from an audiobook we got from the library. Since she loves it, we love it! The thing is:
+
+* The book itself is pretty big and bulky: not good for travelling.
+* When she's tired of it, we need to find a new one = pricey.
+* Also, it's actually hard to find that exact model in Sweden. We were pretty stumped. There was *one* on Facebook Marketplace 2,5 hours drive away from us…
+
+Back in the 90s, me and my siblings (and probably a million more Swedish kids) listened to stories in a cassette tape player at bedtime. We'd fight about who was supposed "turn the side" from A to B or vice versa. The one who cared the most had to cave in and get up and turn the side 🥲
+
+My wife researched some and found this Yoto thing. It's a Big Serious Company™, [funded by the Zuckerbergs](https://chanzuckerberg.com/newsroom/yoto-investment/), and I was obviously skeptical to what new capitalistic lock-in we'd deal with this time. And yes, I wasn't wrong. But! I was positively surprised to find that the Yoto is highly customisable too.
+
+# The basics
+
+* The Yoto player is a screenless audio player for kids.
+* You can play stories and music buy inserting plastic cards — equipped with what I believe are NFC chips — into it, à la cassette player tapes.
+* You can buy premade story cards from Yoto, as well as a myriad of other accessories (💰).
+
+# The customisable parts
+
+* You can buy [Make Your Own-cards](https://eu.yotoplay.com/make-your-own) and **link stuff** onto them with an iOS app.
+* The card doesn't hold any audio data itself. The card merely act as a link when you insert it into the player.
+* The limits for each card are (quoted from their website):
+  - 100 tracks per card
+  - 1 hour running time for any single track
+  - 100MB maximum file size of any single track
+  - 500MB maximum total file size of the audio content for any one card
+* Here's the fun part — you can link these kinds onto the card:
+  - A voice recording (maybe grandma reading a favourite book).
+  - A podcast (add an URL to an RSS feed).
+  - Any MP3 or AAC/M4A file (!).
+
+So, the Yoto player is basically a kid friendly MP3 player combined with being a podcast player. Neat.
+
+The Swedish public service is very nice here, since SR ("Swedish Radio") provides *a ton* of free stuff — even for download directly (if not, you can always open the Network tab in your browser and grab the audio URL when the embedded player plays it). So either:
+
+1. Download those MP3s and transfer to the Yoto, or
+2. Grab the podcast URL (often at the bottom of listings, like [this one](https://sverigesradio.se/avsnitt/klassiska-sagopaketet)) and quickly get aaaalll those sweet kids' stories into the Yoto.
+
+The iOS app is pretty neat, and I found all the things I needed in it. Me and the wife can share a family account in there and manage everything related to the Yoto player. One can even customise pixel art (!) for each track, which will be seen on the tiny Yoto player display. Very cute.
+
+There's also a whole [subreddit `r/YotoPlayer`](https://www.reddit.com/r/YotoPlayer/) where people hack it with custom NFC cards or replace the memory card for a larger one.
+
+# Caveats
+
+The thing to remember is that **1 playlist goes onto 1 card**. They let you customise each playlist with name, description, photo, etc. so it's pretty. So either you dump all your stuff onto a single card, or you cave in and buy more Make Your Own cards to make it pedagogical for your kid (💰💰).
+
+If you want the content to be available offline, be sure to plug the player into power and pause any audio. Then in the iOS app, find the section where you manage local downloads, which will list pending and finished ones. Very transparent and nice. I read somewhere earlier that the player has 32GB of storage, which is plenty for a kid.
+
+***
+
+All in all, we're super happy for now. It's a really cool product. Pretty bummed I didn't think of it myself.