There are certain pieces of tech that define your childhood. For me — a kid growing up in India in the early 2000s — it was the CD.
Not just the shiny disc itself, but everything around it: the ritual of burning one at home, the excitement of curating the perfect mix of songs, the thrill of carrying it to school and popping it into a completely different computer… and watching your files magically appear.
That moment felt like superpowers.
Fast forward a couple of decades, and CDs have quietly faded into obscurity. Streaming and cloud storage are powerful — but somewhere along the way, we lost the personal, handcrafted charm of the mixtape.
So I found myself wondering:
What if we could bring that experience back? What if the mixtape era could live again — but with all the power …
There are certain pieces of tech that define your childhood. For me — a kid growing up in India in the early 2000s — it was the CD.
Not just the shiny disc itself, but everything around it: the ritual of burning one at home, the excitement of curating the perfect mix of songs, the thrill of carrying it to school and popping it into a completely different computer… and watching your files magically appear.
That moment felt like superpowers.
Fast forward a couple of decades, and CDs have quietly faded into obscurity. Streaming and cloud storage are powerful — but somewhere along the way, we lost the personal, handcrafted charm of the mixtape.
So I found myself wondering:
What if we could bring that experience back? What if the mixtape era could live again — but with all the power of the modern web, cloud platforms, and even AI?
That question sparked ReCDFyi. A digital mixtape creator. A virtual CD burner. A little love letter to the tech that raised me — rebuilt for the world we live in today.
💿 What is ReCDFyi?
ReCDFyi lets you:
Upload tracks, images, and metadata
“Burn” them into a virtual CD-style collection
Automatically generate metadata using AI
Publish your CD to the cloud
Share it with a simple link
Let anyone browse your digital mixtape in a nostalgic, retro-inspired interface
It’s fun. It’s expressive. And honestly… it feels like giving people a piece of their childhood back.
Live website- https://recd-fyi.vercel.app/ GitHub Repo- https://github.com/vnmrsharma/ReCDFyi
⚙️ How I Built It (and How Kiro Helped)
This was my first time fully committing to Kiro’s spec-driven and vibe-coding workflow, and I didn’t expect it to be this transformative.
Here’s what I did:
🧩 Spec-first development
I wrote a high-level spec describing:
Upload → metadata → burn → share
Cloud storage integration
Optional AI feature
Modular boundaries for frontend and services
From that spec, Kiro produced structured, testable, clean code. It honestly felt like pairing with a very disciplined engineer.
⚡ Vibe Coding for iteration
Once the foundation was generated, vibe-coding let me:
Quickly tweak components
Add new UI flows
Improve interactions
Fix smaller issues without spinning in circles
This back-and-forth workflow became surprisingly natural.
🔍 Lessons learned
Modularity matters
Specs save time in the long run
AI-assisted development is becoming a superpower
Building nostalgic tech requires equal parts design and soul
ReCDFyi is more polished than most of my hackathon projects — and I credit that entirely to how structured and iterative Kiro kept me.
🔧 Challenges
Every good project fights back a little.
Capturing the nostalgic vibe
The first versions felt too generic. They didn’t “feel” like a mixtape. It took UI iterations and layout experiments to get the vibe right.
Managing optional integrations
Cloud + AI metadata + sharing links… This stack can get messy fast.
The modular service architecture saved the day here.
Handling real-world data
User uploads are unpredictable. File formats break. Metadata is missing. Networks fail.
I built in fallbacks, validators, and robust upload flows to make the experience smooth.
🌱 What’s Next
ReCDFyi doesn’t stop here.
I want to add:
A public community mixtape gallery
Collaborative mixtapes
Comments and reactions
AI-generated album art
Better streaming + user profiles
Indie artist showcase pages
If CDs were the creative canvas of the early 2000s, maybe digital mixtapes can become the canvas of the 2020s.
❤️ Why I Built This
ReCDFyi isn’t just a technical project for me. It’s nostalgia. It’s creativity. It’s the feeling of making something beautiful and giving it to someone you care about.
If you ever burned a CD, exchanged a mixtape, or treasured those little plastic discs… I hope ReCDFyi gives you a spark of that magic again — with a modern twist.
Thanks for reading. And if you’re curious, go ahead and burn your first digital CD. I promise it’s still fun. 🎵💿✨