How to Make Your Own Yoto Card
I know SO MANY of you bought Yoto Players this year for the holidays (if you’re not familiar with Yoto, you can check out my full review here).
And the most common question I’ve gotten about them is “How do I make my own Yoto cards?”
The good news is that it’s simpler than you’d guess!
You can record anything you want on a Yoto card (a grandparent reading aloud a beloved picture book, a parent singing a lullaby, etc).
But if you want to put audiobooks on a Make Your Own Card, here’s how to do that.
A couple of things to know first about making your own Yoto cards:
- You must own the audio files in order to make your own Yoto cards. So audiobooks from Libby or Hoopla or Scribd are a no go.
- Some audiobook platforms don’t give you access to the audiobooks that you DO own. You own your audiobooks from Audible and Chirp, but they don’t give you access to the actual files – you can only play them within their own apps. From what I understand, there are tools you can use to jailbreak your files from Audible (and maybe Chirp), but I’ve never done it and it would certainly be against the terms of service.
- Libro.fm is (in my opinion), the easiest way to make your own Yoto cards. If you’re new to Libro.fm, it’s a lot like Audible except that your monthly membership supports the independent bookstore of your choice instead of Amazon. I have a whole post about it here, but the important thing to know is that your audio files are yours forever and super easy to access, no jailbreaking required.
- Making your own Yoto cards for audiobooks is often MUCH less expensive than buying the cards directly from Yoto. For instance, the full Ramona collection on Yoto costs $64. But you can buy it from Libro.fm for $42.54. And if you are a member, it’s only $14.99 with your credit. So that’s a WHOLE lot cheaper.
- You can rerecord on your Make Your Own Yoto Cards as many times as you want. So if your child listens to Boxcar Children 100x and then is ready to move on, you can rerecord a new audiobook for repeat listening!
Okay! Let’s get to how to do it.
How to Make Your Own Yoto Card
This can ALL be done straight from your phone – no computer required!
First, buy your audiobook from Libro.fm. If this is your first time using Libro.fm, sign up with my link here and you’ll get two audiobooks instead of one for the same price!
(They also have new sale titles all the time and I check their sale page several times a month – nothing better than scoring an audiobook for a couple of dollars, plus you don’t need to be a member to grab the sale titles!).
Go to your Account (this must be on the website, not the app) and scroll down until you see your books (under the Library section). Find the book you want to make a Yoto card with and click the “Download Files” button. Save them as an Audio zip file on your phone.
Now open your Yoto App. Click “Create” on the bottom.
Click “Make a Playlist.”
Name your new playlist (I always just name it the name of the book). Then choose “Add Audio Files.”
When the new window pops up, navigate to your download folder. Open the folder and find your folder for your audiobook (if you don’t see it, use the search bar to find it!).
Make sure your book has a green checkmark next to it and choose “Create playlist”.
Once all the files have uploaded, drag and drop them into order as necessary, then choose “Create.”
Go back to the Yoto app, Click “Library” on the bottom and you’ll see your new recording under “My playlists” Select a playlist, and click the three vertical dots to the right and choose “Link to a Card” on the menu that pops up.
Put your blank card in the Yoto player and press “Use your Yoto player” on the app. Or, even easier, choose the “Use your phone” options and hold up the card to your phone when prompted. When the button turns green, it’s linked and ready to play.
Label your card. I like to wrap a piece of washi tape around the top of the card and write the title on that or if I’m feeling fancy, here’s how to make really great custom labels for your Yoto cards with the cover art!
Of course, there are lots of variations on these instructions – you can get your files from elsewhere (including ripping CDs to your computer) and you could transfer the files to your phone via AirDrop or another method.
However you choose to do it, I hope this helps!
Any questions about how to make your own Yoto card? Let me know and I’m happy to help!
If you liked this post this post on how to make your own Yoto card, you might also like these other posts:
- 15 Fantastic Grandparent Gifts to Give to Grandchildren
- Two Studies about the Benefits of Audiobooks
- 20+ Best Audiobooks for Family Road Trips
Photos by Heather Mildenstein
This was incredibly helpful — so easy to follow! THANK YOU!!
Thank you for doing this! So helpful! Just downloaded “The Boxcar Children” from Libro.fm and made a card. So awesome! 🙂
It’s important to know that you CAN add to Yoto via the Overdrive app that is also likely available through your library. Not Hoopla or Libby, but most libraries that have Libby have Overdrive.
Download the Overdrive app directly to your desktop, then you will have an MP3 copy of the book on your computer. Upload that to Yoto MYO library, and boom, make your own card!
Have fun!
How were you able to get the overdrive app directly to your desktop? When I try it days it is only available for iPhones and iPads…
Go to overdrive.com.apps/overdrive and see if that helps!
Looks like you can no longer download overdrive! Any other tips or thoughts?
How do you make a music card?
Thank you! How long does it take to link to a card? The length of the tracks?
It takes about five minutes for me to make a Yoto card.
A Make Your Own Card holds:
100 tracks per card
100MB / 60 minutes maximum file size of any single track
500MB / 5 hours maximum total file size of the audio content for any one card
Hi! Just bought some audio books rom libro.fm and followed your instructions. My playlists won’t play on the player though…they link but then nothing happens and it says “there was an error playing this content”. I’ve searched all over the yoto help websites but can’t ind anything. I was thinking it was a problem with the mp3 files? They play on my phone but not the players…and i’ve made other cards before that have worked just fine. I’m just not sure why it won’t work.
Thanks so much for your help!!
Thank you for the helpful instructions! I successfully recorded my parents reading several books, and I linked the card using wifi. It downloaded and worked pefectly. However, when the player is offline and I insert the card it says, “it has to be online to play.” Do the MYO cards only work when online? I thought they would work offline once downloaded like any other card. I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong.
What other websites can you download from? Libro.fm doesn’t have the book I want.
You can try Downpour. Which book are you looking for?
We just got Yoto Minis for our kids for Christmas and they are already loving them. Is there any way to make a story they love from a podcast into a blank Yoto card? They love the Anansi stories from the podcast Super Great kids stories. They are also on YouTube. Any way to make them on to a Yoto card?!?! Thanks for your help!
You can make a Yoto card for that podcast with this RSS Feed https://feeds.megaphone.fm/super-great-kids-stories
Have you ever tried to add your own audio to a Yoto card that has audio already on it? Not a make your own card?
It won’t work. They’re locked.
Thanks so much! Will this retain the chapter splits? Or just one long recording?
Depends on the audio but the vast majority of them have a track for each chapter.
Thank you so much!!
What do you do if the book is longer than the allotted 6 hours?
You’d need two cards then
Can you still use cards that you have made (example grandparent reading card) if you are not part of Yoto club?
Yes!
Would I need to leave the saved audio file on my phone after creating the card? I don’t want to use up all of my storage on my phone. Thank you!
nope. It is on LibrofM so you can always redownload it if you need to.
I download the zip from libro.fm but when i access it through yoto it is greyed out and won’t let me select it. Do i need some other app to allow the zip file to work.
Did you unzip the files? If they’re still zipped, they aren’t usable.
This isn’t in the steps, so make sure you unzip the folder after you download it by going into your phone files, finding the zip folder, holding down, and selecting “uncompress” to unzip the files, THEN you’ll be able to add the folder to your playlist.