Greetings to you all,  I wish to inform MMDers that we have completed
the development of a pinned barrel scanner.  A short presentation is
available on YouTube at http://it.youtube.com/watch?v=LvBxip2xC48 

The scanner has been developed by a team composed of me, the fellow
MMDer Flavio Pedrazzini, and two friends, Luigi Mastrosimone and
Niccolò Perego, who were patient enough to tolerate our mechanical
music craziness and support some parts of the development.

The scanner has been designed so as to support scanning of whatever
piano or organ barrel, up to a maximum size of 1.5 meter length,
50 cm. diameter.  Very small barrels, such as those from carillons,
are not supported.  It can read both normal and helicoidal barrels.

This scanner will be operating at the new base of AMMI, at Villa
Silvia, Cesena, Italy.  It will be used for extracting the music
from the barrels to a MIDI file, for all possible applications:
musicology studies, reading of orphan barrels, reconstruction
of damaged barrels, and so on.

All comments are welcome.

Regards from Italy,
Leonardo Perretti

 [ Read more about l'Associazione Musica Meccanica Italiana (AMMI)
 [ at http://www.ammi-italia.com/  A photo of Leonardo Perretti at
 [ work restoring an early Welte-Mignon Vorsetzer appears at
 [ http://www.ammi-italia.com/page5/page30/page30.html  -- Robbie