Music/audio player for 5yo

[mincepiesallround]

Not sure if this is the right place to post but there are a lot of experts on this board!

I want to get my 5 yo some sort of music/audio player he can have in his room. I don’t want one I have to buy all the bits separately for (tonie, yo-yo etc) because all the media is already on my phone on Apple Books/Apple Music/audible. Something I could upload the media to but he could use by himself… does that exist?

My older daughter had a bog standard CD player for years so we do have lots of CDs but I feel like I need to move with the times…

(This is for his Christmas present so not a completely non Christmas related thread )

Dot

I've just bought the yoto for DS for Christmas, but I've not bought the story cards from them, just a pack of the 'make your own' cards which I can now upload all of our media to. DS can't change the cds himself so the yoto will be easier for him to operate.

YY I was going to suggest Yoto and blank cards.

How will he choose and play the music he wants if it's just a digital library?

I was trying to do this for dd's birthday and ended up with kids echo - alexa is evil and listens to us. I hate it, but it was a cheap option. She loves it!

Can you put audiobooks onto the blank yoto cards?

I suppose I was imagining an mp3 player or something like that. Kids’ echo does look like it might be the best option as then he can access our audible account but I feel the same as you drywhite about Alexa!

Yes you can put anything you want on the blank Yoto cards. The pack of 10 comes with stickers that are presumably to help differentiate between the cards so DC can work out what's on each one.

You can also play music using the Yoto app on your phone, although that obviously requires adult input.

I wonder if they have a child-friendly app for a tablet, now that would be handy!

(I mean play content, not just music, and play it through the Yoto speaker, using phone app to control it.)

Do you want it to be able to download the files by wifi, or are you happy to transfer them over manually? The tricky bit is that a lot of what we listen to is streamed and that tends to need online capability.

Basically you just need an iPod. I miss iPods. There are loads of MP3 players out there. The best interface would probably come from having an old phone totally locked down for everything except audible or music, and connecting it to a speaker.

Ours had sandisk clipjams. Little tiny MP3 players that we drag audiobooks over to on the computer. Quite a fiddly interface as it’s not a nice large screen. But they last for absolutely ages.

I've spent the last few evenings copying all of DS's audio books onto yoto cards (it's pretty easy, just takes a while to upload everything, so I've had it going on in the background while doing other things). Each card can hold 100 tracks, and each track can be up to an hour, so maximum 100 hours of play on each card! You can assign a little pixel picture to each track, so I've picked things that DS will associate (e.g. an ear for The BFG) and will also make him a little list of what is on each card with the track number and pixel image so that he can choose his story easily. I've managed to put about 7/8 audio books on each card (some books are just 1 or 2 long tracks, but some are 10-20 short chapters as separate tracks, so they use up more space on the cards).

You can also overwrite the cards if you decide you want different things on them, so I can't really imagine needing more than the pack of 10 cards, plus the player came with one MYO card.

Got to say, these yoto cards sound good. Are they basically like cassette tapes were for us in the 80’s? All my kids audiobooks had been transferred to cassette, and loads more were recorded by my grandparents / parents. My favourite ones were where me and my sister “helped” with the narration 😁

My two year old has a yoto player and absolutely adores it. Some of her favourites are from make your own cards including grandma reading her stories and the Paddington audiobook which I bought from Amazon. It's really easy to do once you get the hang of it and you can reuse the make your own cards as their tastes change.

These yoto cards do sound good!

@Talipesmum yes, I think I’m hankering after old, outdated technology I don’t mind transferring files manually but I guess the problem is that I don’t actually have a lot of the files - I mean I don’t know if I could download files from audible but I’m going to guess not…

You definitely can download the files from audible. You need to get the audible app or something for your computer and do it through there. That’s how I get a lot of the files off onto the sandisk. But it was a bit of a fiddle originally figuring out how to do it. There are a few help files around but I can see mention of “audible ready devices” … worth researching!

Oh ok that’s good to know! All our Harry Potter audiobooks are on there and I don’t fancy buying those separately. Ok. Maybe this yoto thing is the way to go then.