Introducing the Musidex: A physical music library for the streaming era

18 Feb 2026

While I listen to a lot of music, my object permanence active recall is weak when it comes to remembering the artists and albums that I love.¹ This didn’t used to be a problem, as flipping through my CDs or (later) scrolling through my iTunes library would jog my memory.

When I switched over to using music streaming services my listening patterns shifted towards recent releases, and I found myself inadvertently losing track of the broad back catalog of music I loved.

Several years ago I decided that I wanted a physical manifestation of my favorite albums, an analog reminder of myself through reminding me of the music I’ve loved. A collection for re-discovery, by myself or anyone visiting my home. I didn’t want to stop using a streaming service, but I did want to supplement it with a physical link of some sort.²

I couldn’t find a suitable solution, so I made one. Enter: the Musidex!

The Musidex is a Rolodex³ full of albums. Each page presents a single album’s art and basic metadata—album title, artist, release year—along with a QR code that links to playback on a music streaming platform.⁴

It has an NFC tag to the side knob; when I tap my phone on the tag, the phone connects and starts broadcasting to my living room speakers. I mounted the Musidex on a pair of hooks next to the speakers.

Several years in, I continue to appreciate my Musidex: both because I use it on a semi-regular basis, and because I enjoy its colorful presence in my home.

I’ve built two Musidexes⁵ now, and have found them to be relatively cheap, lightweight, and easy to make. The details are as follows.

Exhibit A: Musidex I

The first Musidex I built, pictured above, was for myself.

On the software and curation side, I wrote a couple of scripts to parse (1) my ancient iTunes library backup and (2) a streaming service playlist, to which I added tracks from my most recent decade of listening. The scripts took in the specific song, found the album that the song came from, and then dumped the album’s metadata into a table with its streaming service URL, along with links to locally downloaded album art.

I then did a bunch of manual deduplication and title/artist cleanup within that spreadsheet, to make sure that all of the text would fit nicely on the Rolodex cards.

On the real-world side, I acquired a Rolodex and removed its pages, cut a bunch of cardstock into the correct page size, used a specialized die to punch the specially-shaped notches into the cards, and arranged them by color.⁶

I then printed sheets of the album art at a local print shop and printed clear stickers containing the rest of the metadata using a mini thermal printer.

I cut out the albums by hand and glued one to each page, paired with its metadata sticker.

Details

• Roughly 300 pages, space for two albums per page (one each front and back)
• Highly curated, with only one album per artist
• Some pages intentionally left blank, to allow future additions
• No album ordering—fully randomized
• A few pages linking to playlists instead of albums, each on a shiny (instead of solid color) page
• Albums printed on regular paper and glued to pages; metadata printed on clear stickers

Challenges

• Music curation and selection was rough; narrowing this collection down to one album per artist was really rough.
• Matching iTunes albums to albums on my streaming service was rough, and only partially successful, and required using an external service to do the translation.⁷
• I had to accept that some of the songs I’d listened to obsessively in the past just didn’t exist on a streaming service, and without spending the time to set up a local server, I wasn’t going to be able to include them here.

Exhibit B: Musidex II

The second Musidex I built was for my dad.

I thought I’d made choices and learned lessons when making the first one that would make creating a second one trivially easy—after all, I had the scripts to pull in album art and generate QR codes already, and our listening tastes overlap enough that I knew a majority of his library had links to our streaming service. How hard could making the thing really be? 🙃

Only one aspect was actively easier: instead of printing the metadata and album art separately, I printed both together onto white stickers, one per page. This improved both speed of assembly and legibility on darker-colored cards.

Specification

• Roughly 300 pages containing 600 albums (one each front and back)
• Highly curated, with multiple albums per artist in a few cases and no pages left blank
• At the recipient’s request, albums roughly sorted into five genres
• Metadata and album art printed together on a single white sticker

Challenges

• It turned out that the iTunes script I’d made for pulling in my library didn’t work with my dad’s exported iTunes library, thanks to a differing XML version; I had to clean it up instead of using it verbatim.
• Figuring out a usable genre grouping was tricky and angst-ridden, lol.
• Even with years of listening history by which to sort the albums—thanks, iTunes “play count”!—the task still required a lot of manual curation, including some back and forth with my sister and parents to figure out which albums should take precedence.

Future directions

There’s a lot of room for creative solutions to the “tangible curation of digital items” problem. While there are some commercial systems out there already, nothing I’ve found has been particularly useful as an augmentation to my existing listening workflow.⁸

The Musidex’s approach to tangible computing—a collection of links to to a collection of digital artifacts, presented physically—is easily adaptable.⁹

In the abstract, any collection of URLs (QR code or NFC or written) will do, in any form factor you find pleasing: a deck of cards! A mobile! A collection of fridge magnets! A poster for your wall! Some decoupaged dominos!¹⁰ Assorted objects in an antique curio cabinet or card catalog!¹¹

Sticking with the Rolodex base, collections that could lend themselves well to the Musidex treatment:

• Mediadex: Movies/videos/tv shows, with links to their streaming service;
• Bookdex: Books, with links to their accompanying audiobook, or to your review of them, or with no link at all
• Ornitholodex: a collection of birds, with links to their birdcall or recently tracked migration patterns
• T-Rexdex: …no idea, but it sounds cool!
• Chromadex: what you get before you add the albums to a Musidex:

Thanks to AF for being the assistant producer of my first Musidex, by listening to my errant brainstorming and then seeking out and gifting the requisite components: Rolodex-shaped hole punch, Rolodex, and mini sticker printer. <3

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• Created: 2026-02-18
• Type: Project write-up
• Tags: digital-to-analog-but-not-like-that, houseplant-programming, all-the-colors, jukebox-poseur, audio, programming-as-a-tool