Record your first story
About fifteen minutes, most of it spent reading a book out loud. You need the box, a phone, a book, and one blank card.
Before you start
- The box, charged or plugged in
- A phone — any phone, iPhone or Android
- A book you like reading and have read before
- One playing card with a sticker on the back, not yet used
- A quiet-ish room. Not silent — a normal room is fine
-
Turn the box on and find it
Slide the switch. The light comes on within a second or two.
On your phone, open WiFi settings and join the network called tape- followed by four characters — it is printed on the bottom of the box. A page opens by itself. If it does not, open a browser and go to
192.168.4.1.Your phone will say this network has no internet. That is correct and you should stay connected anyway. The box is not on the internet; it is just the box.
Optional, but do it once: the page offers to join your home WiFi. Give it your network and password and from then on you can reach the box from your normal network without switching. It keeps its own network as well, so it still works at a grandparent’s house or in the car.
-
Record the book
Use your phone’s voice recorder. Voice Memos on an iPhone, Recorder on most Android phones. It is already installed, it handles a phone call interrupting you, and what it records is already backed up with everything else on your phone.
Hold the phone about a hand’s width away, off to one side so page turns are not right in the microphone. Press record and read the book.
Reading it well, which matters more than any of the electronics:- Read slower than feels natural. On a recording it will sound right.
- Leave two full seconds of silence at the start and end. Silence is easy to keep and impossible to add later.
- Say the page-turn out loud if the child will be following along in the book — “turn the page” is a feature, not a blemish.
- Do not restart because of a stumble. A stumble sounds like a person. A retake sounds like a product.
- A long book: stop at the end of each chapter and start a new recording. Each one becomes a track, which is what makes the back button land somewhere sensible.
If you would rather have level meters and track splitting built in, use the studio instead — it does the same job and hands you the same files. It has to run on this website rather than on the box, for a browser reason.
-
Put it on the box
Go back to the box’s page — its address on your home WiFi, or rejoin its own network. Then:
- Tap Add a book.
- Tap Choose files and pick your recording. If you made several, pick them all — they become tracks in the order you recorded them.
- Type the title, and who read it. The child will never see this; you will, when you have forty of them.
- Tap Upload. A twenty-minute book takes a few seconds.
Nothing leaves your house. The file goes from your phone to the box's SD card and stops there.
-
Make the card
The box now says Put a card on the pad. Lay your blank card flat in the recess on top, sticker side down. The box writes it and the page says which book it belongs to.
Write the code shown on the card, in biro, somewhere it will not rub off. You will not normally need it — but the day a card ends up in the wrong book, it is how you find out which one it is.
One card at a time. Do not rest the rest of the deck on the pad. Two cards at once and the box blinks and does nothing, on purpose — it will not guess which one you meant.
-
Put the card in the book
That is the filing system, and it is the whole trick. The card lives inside the front cover of the book it belongs to. When the child brings you the book, the card is already there.
-
Give it to them
Card on the box: it plays. Card off: it stops, and remembers where. Card back on tomorrow: it carries on. There is nothing else to explain, and you should not explain it — hand them the box and the card and let them work it out, which takes most four-year-olds about four seconds.
When something is wrong
| What you see | Almost always |
|---|---|
| Card on the pad, nothing happens | The card is upside down, or the sticker is not over the recess. Try the other face. If it never reads, that card may be on a foil-backed deck — those cannot work, the metal detunes the antenna. |
| The box blinks and refuses | More than one card in range. Take the deck off the box. |
| Playback stutters or restarts | The card is at the edge of range and the box keeps losing it. Push it fully into the recess. |
| The phone will not join the box | Your phone dropped it for having no internet. Rejoin, and choose “stay connected”. |
| The upload page will not load | You are on your home WiFi and the box is not, or the other way round. Both have to be on the same one. |
| Recording is quiet or boomy | The phone was too far away, or too close. A hand’s width, off to one side. |
| It plays the wrong book | That card was bound to something else. Re-bind it from the box’s page — the audio does not move and nothing is lost. |
| Chewed, bent or lost card | New sticker, new card, bind it to the same book. Fourteen cents. The recording was never on the card. |
Keeping the recordings
The box is a box. It can be dropped, and SD cards fail. The recordings are the only part of this that cannot be replaced — a grandparent reading a book is not re-recordable later.
- If you recorded on your phone, the originals are already in your phone’s backups. This is the single best reason to record there rather than in a browser.
- Copy
/tape/off the SD card to a computer now and then. It is a folder of audio files and one small JSON file; there is no format to be locked into. - Cards are consumable. Boxes are replaceable. The folder is the thing to keep.
Building one first? Assembly. Curious why any of it works this way? The design record.