See what you’re streaming with Tuneshine’s amazing LED album art

If like me you love digital music but miss the days of album art bigger than a thumbnail, Tuneshine may well be the perfect gadget.

It's a low-res LED screen that takes the album art of whatever you're listening to and displays it on a 6.3-inch square panel. That's not quite as big as an LP sleeve, but it's much bigger than the little image on your smartphone's music app.

The wooden-framed, 1.57-inch thick Tuneshine is designed to be wall mounted or sat on a desk, and its display consists of 64 x 64 bright LEDs.

That means everything's purposefully pixelated when viewed close up, but the idea here is for you to be sitting somewhere else. Creator Tobias Butler calls it a "dynamic art piece". The panel is rated for 11 years or 100,000 hours of use.

Tuneshine LED display: key features and pricing

Tuneshine works with iOS and Android, and connects to your phone via Wi-Fi to get the album art from Spotify, Apple Music, Sonos and last.fm.

It also works with some podcast apps, and you can specify an image of your own for the Tuneshine to display when you're not listening to anything. Once you've set up the display, you don't need to return to the app – it'll grab the artwork automatically from compatible services as you use them.

There's no subscription fee for Tuneshine, although some additional "resource intensive" features may require payment. At the moment there's just one of those, sharing Tuneshine with someone else.

That requires a membership of one dollar per month or ten dollars a year; that's roughly £7.38 at current exchange rates.

Available from a dedicated website, the Tuneshine itself is cheaper than you might expect: $199 / £150 (about €170 / AU$300). But if you're ordering from outside the US you'll need to take shipping and taxes into consideration as each Tuneshine is handmade in and shipped from the US.