I was just playing through my tunes yesterday, getting ready to pack
the music box and strips for a move.  I have punched two good strips,
"Ode to Joy" and "Suo Gan".

Realizing that very few tunes are going to easily shoehorn into a
diatonic scale, I have used the program Harmony Assistant to covert
existing MIDI files into the 20 note scale.  I open the MIDI file,
copy it an octave down, combine the staves, then do the conversion to
my 20-note scale as a custom "band organ".  The program tells you how
many steps to transpose in order to keep the most notes.  Then I print
it out in a format I have created to give the same strip width and
spacing.  There are minor details like limiting note duration to the
minimum and taking care to avoid repetition since there is a minimum
distance needed.

Unfortunately, without exception, the result has not had enough notes
on it to make a decent tune.  Only a few small sections of the Ampico
roll "Clair de Lune" by Debussy were recognizable at all.  The two
strips I have successfully made have simply been done by laying out
the basic melody and adding in rolling chords or some doubling on the
theme.

At MMD, of course, there is the Sankyo 20-Note page at the MMD Sounds
page which you hopefully have already discovered.  Try the "Suo Gan"
published there.  The MIDI file is actually Robbie's keyboard
interpretation, reading off the strip!

  http://www.mmdigest.com/Sounds/sankyo20.html 

Try a search on "pling plong" and you will find some interesting
material too!

Karl Petersen
Boise, Idaho