Further thoughts for Mark.  The MBSGB book, "Nicole Factor", has a CD
with recordings of cylinder boxes.  Whilst not perfect (some tones come
across impure on my audio equipment), they are perfectly listenable.
According to the paper with the CD, the recordings were done by Barry
Wilson, although there is also mention of "mixing and mastering" by
Holland Road Studio.  It might be worth following up with Barry, who is
an MBSGB member.

Regarding putting tunes on the web, I thought about doing something
like that, to help people who are trying to identify tunes on their
cylinder boxes.  However, I couldn't get past the problem of how you
would search for a tune if all you had was the tune itself, rather than
its name.  And if you had its name, why would you be searching anyway?
I guess it's a bit different with discs since you might want to listen
to a tune before you bought the disc...

Final thought for today: is this akin to the piano roll scanning
project where the main objective is preservation of the music?
Should all types of mechanical music be recorded/scanned/converted to
MIDI, including disc boxes, cylinder boxes, organettes (in all their
various guises, i.e. disc, cob, paper roll), other organs (fair, dance,
street, etc.), where that isn't already done?  The data could then be
cross-referenced to compare arrangements, for example.  It would be
interesting to hear opinions on that (although I expect Robbie and
friends aren't too happy about hosting that much data !).

Regards,
John Farmer, UK