Jody,

As promised, this is my introduction to the group.

A brief business background, I have been in the computer business for over
    31 years now. I think I lost count. But that is how I make my spending
money.

My mechanical music interests are narrow and involve either disk music boxes
or the Violano Virtuoso. About 6 years ago, I created a bread board digital
player system for the Violano using a garden variety PC as its base. This
worked out well for me since I had about 8 rolls and it was difficult and
expensive to get more rolls. I was able to get digitized rolls (lots of them)
from an un-named source for my player system. This made me very happy
since I have about 350 digital rolls now.

The player system has since been improved 2 times, over the bread board system
and works very well. Some of you probably saw my article on it in the
'91 MBSI Journal. Also it was demonstrated at Ralph and Gloria Schack's
house during the LA convention a few years ago. The idea was sold/given
to Mike Ames since I have no time to deal with it for other interested people.
Mike's version is a MIDI implementation which can be played by either a
computer running my program or a Roland Brush (a floppy disk player). I still
use my last production system, but supply Mike with the computer version
if somebody wants it. (We are putting one in at a neighbor of Ralph & Gloria).

Besides the player, some of you may have seen previous discussions about
MIDI and organs. The Violano also plays as a stop on my Allen theatre organ.
The violin is one stop and the piano is the other. The same computer that
acts as the digital player system also co-ordinates 5 samplers, one synth
and the Violano for the organ. If some of you remember, there were very few
keyboard played Violanos. I think mine is the only one played that way except
for the 3 that were built to do it. The program has to figure out where to
place the notes on the violin in real time. A bit messy, but it works well.

So if there are question on MIDI, the Violano, computer programming, PCs,
and some disk music box questions, I can probably help.

Jim Gallops
jgallops@gallops.com
gallops@hdshq.com