Published by Rafe Blandford at 16:53 UTC, March 8th 2013

These tags can best be described as real world shortcuts to music, or as Mark Mulligan described it recently, when writing on his Music Industry Blog , sonic augmented reality. There's a whole raft of potential uses, from personal use (i.e. quick access to your favourite mixes), to public music discovery (e.g. on posters), and promotional previews (e.g. outside a music venue).

At last week's MWC one of the more effective NFC-related demos was Nokia's use of NFC tags to trigger the playing of Nokia Music Mixes. When tapped by a Lumia device running Windows Phone 8 these tags, after the standard NFC on-screen prompt was accepted, would trigger the opening of the Nokia Music app and start the playback of a specific Mix.





So how can you create these tags yourself? Well, it is possible to write them using one of the existing NFC writing app for Windows Phone, such as Nfc Interactor, but by far and away the easiest option is to use Steve Robbin's Mix NFC Tag Writer app, which does most of the hard work for you (i.e. working out the data and mix identifiers to use).

The Mix NFC Tag Writer app lets you write links for Nokia's pre-defined mixes, or for custom mixes. For the pre-defined mixes you select the mix category (e.g. Charts) and the mix you want to link to (e.g. UK singles chart). For custom mixes you will need to specify between one and three artists (e.g. Lordi, The Smiths, and The Muppets) that will be used to seed (generate) the mix. In both cases the app uses the Nokia Music APIs to pull the necessary information from Nokia's server.

Once you have selected, or created, the Nokia Music Mix you want to write to an NFC tag you simply tap the publish button and hold the tag up to the back of the phone (or wherever the NFC aerial is located). The app will let you known when the link has been sucessfully written to the NFC tag.





Mix NFC Tag Writer can be downloaded from the Windows Phone Store for free. In order to use the app you'll need some writeable NFC tags, which can be purchased from various online reatilers, including Amazon. You can expect to pay about £1 per tag when buying in small quantities.