Make Your Own cards confuse people for one reason: they look like they hold the music. They don't. Once you understand what's actually on the card, a lot of odd Yoto behaviour suddenly makes sense.
The card is a bookmark
There's a tiny chip in the card, the same kind that's in a contactless bank card. It holds an identifier. That's all. No audio, no track names, no icons.
When you slot the card in, the player reads that identifier, and then goes and asks Yoto's servers what it means. The server says “that one's Emma's bedtime playlist, here are the tracks”, and the player fetches them.
So the card is a bookmark. The actual content lives in your Yoto account, online, and the card is just a physical shortcut to it that a two-year-old can operate.
What follows from that
You can change what a card plays without touching the card. Edit the playlist in the app and the card now plays the new thing. The card in the drawer hasn't changed at all. This is why one MYO card can be a Christmas playlist in December and a holiday playlist in July.
Editing while your child is listening is a bit awkward. The player has already been told what the card means. Changes generally show up once it next checks in, so if you're mid-edit and someone's mid-story, expect a lag rather than an instant switch.
The first play needs wifi.The player has to download the audio before it can play it. After that it's stored on the player itself, so the card works in the car and on a plane. This trips people up when they make a card the night before a trip and don't play it once at home first. Always test-play a new card before you leave.
Losing the card doesn't lose the playlist.It's still in your account. You can link a new blank card to it.
Someone else's player can't use your card.The content belongs to your account, so handing a friend your MYO card doesn't hand them the audio.
What you can put on one
Audio you own or have the right to use. Audiobooks you've bought as files, music, podcast episodes, and — the one everybody ends up loving — recordings of your own family. Grandparents reading a bedtime story. Someone singing off-key at a birthday. A five-minute ramble about the day's news from a four-year-old.
The homemade recordings are consistently the cards that get played until they wear out. If you make one card, make that one.
Tracks, and why the icons matter
Each card holds a list of tracks, and each track gets its own icon on the player's screen. As your child skips forward, the icon changes.
For a child who can't read, that icon isthe track name. It's how they know they've reached the dinosaur song rather than the one about brushing teeth. It's worth more thought than it first appears, which is a big part of why we're building this site.
You can pick from Yoto's library or upload your own. If you want to make your own, we've written up the three ways to do it.
How long a card can be
Long. Realistically the limit you'll hit is your own patience for uploading, not the card. A full audiobook split into chapters is completely normal.
What is worth thinking about is how many tracks you give a small child. Forty tracks means forty presses to get to the one they want. Splitting a long thing across two or three cards is often kinder than one enormous one.
The practical bit
Blank MYO cards come in packs and they all look identical, which is its own small problem. Write on them, put a sticker on them, or do what we're building a tool for and print a proper label. A stack of indistinguishable white cards is the natural end state of enthusiasm, and it's worth heading off early.