> Larry Smith: could you kindly contact Porter Music Box Company and ask
> their thoughts on these topics?  I wonder if Rouge is working on this
> problem...

I have some deadlines coming up but I will try to get to it.
I've been getting busy signals all morning.

I would be surprised if Reuge is doing anything much with disks.  Aside
from the Thoren's 4 1/2" disk player they have no great commitment to
disks.  The 11" player is very hard to obtain and the disks are only
intermittantly available for it, and I am aware of no others in their
product line.  They seem to be concentrating on their cylinder boxes,
which seem to be more popular than disks in the "retro" market,
especially the larger cartel boxes.  What's worse, they have
deliberately modified the 4 1/2 inch design to render it incapable of
playing antique Thoren's 4 1/2 disks (according to Nancy Fratti)
without some kind of finicky adjustment.  Probably to lock people into
buying their $20 new disks instead of the $10 antiques.  They would
seem to be quite the opposite.

On the subject of scanning and recording disks in general, I've been
thinking that one of the best things we could do would be to build up a
library of musical box tunes that can be in the public domain or under
the GPL.  One of my fond daydreams is of bootstrapping a little company
to produce music boxes of various types, like Porter, but with less
fancy cases and _much_ smaller price tags, to satisfy guys like me with
champagne tastes and a beer budget.  Also, it will help protect these
things from the slow attrition that eventually eliminates antiques from
people's daily world until they become hyper-expensive showpieces that
can no longer be used as they were intended.  It would be great to do
the same with cylinder boxes, but I fear that that would entail somehow
recording the actual arrangements of comb and other pieces as well as
the pinning of the cylinder, and that's a much larger project.  Disks
are much more predictable in that respect and make a worthy start.  We
shall probably have to satisfy ourselves with CD's of restored boxes
that Nancy and others manage to make for cylinders.

regards,¶
Larry Smith

 [ Editor's Note:
 [
 [ Most of our readers don't know that "GPL" means "GNU Public Licence".
 [ Perhaps Larry will elaborate on this, as I'm sure I'll won't hit
 [ all the highlights below...  The GNU project (GNU's Not Unix)
 [ (a recrusive name!) is sponsored by the "Free Software Foundation".
 [ The fundamental principle of "Free" Software is that the "source code"
 [ is "free".  If you make a product based on GNU software source code,
 [ you are required to make the source code available to those who get/buy
 [ your software.  This allows the user to "change or improve" the
 [ code.  The GNU "license agreement" is so much the antithesis of
 [ a Copyright, that its called a "Copyleft".  I'll leave further
 [ discussion of the politics to others.  The GNU project has
 [ placed an unbelievable amount of GOOD QUALITY software with
 [ source code in the hands of interested computer science students,
 [ and in my opinion has furthered greatly the state of computer
 [ science.
 [
 [ In the case of "music box discs" (or is that disks?), the
 [ implicatoin of GPL would be that the files (MIDI or image) would
 [ be available for anyone to use, but if you made a product from
 [ the files, you would have to make any "editing improvements"
 [ to those files available as source (free).  Its an interesting
 [ way to [attempt] to insure that the collaborative work
 [ of a number of people precipitates more collaboration in
 [ the future.
 [
 [ Jody