Mix CD
Music Box, burned to disc. Each track's cover art is printed on a CD that spins while it plays.
Context
Music Box put a working player on every page of this site. Mix CD keeps everything underneath it (the same YouTube playlist, the same shuffle, the same metadata lookups) and asks a different question: what if the player were the object itself? The current track's cover art is printed onto a compact disc, and the disc spins while the song plays.
Live from YouTube: Tame Impala's "Let It Happen", with its cover art pulled in and pressed onto the disc.
Problem
A thumbnail in a pill tells you what's playing, but it doesn't feel like putting something on. Cover art used to arrive on a physical thing you held, loaded and watched turn. The goal was to bring that back without adding weight: a player people want to watch, that still works like every other player they know.
Track number, title and artist, then a scrubber with seven-segment time readouts, unlit segments included.
Role & Approach
I designed and built it myself. The first pass was a turntable: a vinyl record with the art as its label and a tonearm that tracked inward as the song played. I moved it to a compact disc, which suits a shuffled playlist better than an LP, and gave it two faces. A printed disc carries the art edge to edge. A burned CD-R has the art as a round sticker, with the title and artist written on in marker.
Two faces: a full-face print, or a burned CD-R with a sticker and a marker scrawl.
Process
The disc follows real proportions: a 15 mm center hole, a clear hub with its stacking ring and laser-etched microtext, a mirror band, the print area and a clear outer rim. The player's spindle shows through the hole. The rainbow off the metal layer stays still while the disc turns, the way light behaves on a real CD. That one detail does most of the work in making the spin read as real. The disc spins up when you press play and coasts to a stop when you pause.
Up close: the spindle with its three clamp balls, the stacking ring and the etched microtext.
Eject & Track List
Changing tracks ejects the disc. The drive brakes, the disc lifts off the spindle (its shadow dropping away beneath it) and slides out, leaving the empty drive. The next disc arrives still raised, with its art already printed, and settles onto the spindle before it spins up. The audio switches without waiting. Tapping the track number flips the disc over to the back of a jewel case: a paper insert listing the whole shuffle in play order, with the current song highlighted. Titles load a few at a time as you scroll, and tapping any track loads that disc.
The back of the case: the full shuffle on a rear insert, folded spines and a barcode included.
Constraints
YouTube only provides 16:9 thumbnails, so the disc crops to the centered square where music uploads place their album art. The sharpest size is missing for some videos, so it falls back to a smaller one. YouTube also refuses to play from a local file or a sandboxed preview, so every test had to run from a real web address. Visitors who prefer reduced motion get a still disc.
The burned face on a dark page. The cover art also blooms softly behind the disc.
Try it
This one is live. It plays the same playlist as the Music Box bar, and the two take turns: starting one pauses the other.
Not a mockup. Press play, skip to eject and load the next disc, tap the track number for the track list, and switch the disc face. Or open it full screen.
Summary
Mix CD is Music Box with a body. The engine is unchanged; the interface is an object you watch. Each song changes the disc's art, and the spin and stillness follow the playback.
Next Steps
Live and iterating. The eject-and-load swap between tracks and the jewel-case track list both shipped in this round.