Hi to all of you.  I've been very involved with work on the possible MBSI
museum in the new NAWCC museum expansion so haven't had much of a chance
to participate in the exciting MMD discussions which seem to spring up
faster than one can read and respond to them!  But ... Here's a piece of
exciting information for MMD readers:

There is a new, fledgling but extremely fine and exciting mechanical
music web page available.  It has been developed for the Austrian Academy
of Sciences' Phonogrammarchiv, which has as one of its primary activities
the recording, identification and classification of the music played on
mechanical music instruments.  The URL is

    http://www.kfs.oeaw.ac.at/dli/mech/dlidem1.htm

This web page not only has pictures of and text about mechanical music
instruments (only a few to begin with but interesting ones) but also has
sound clips which allow you to hear the instrument.  The sound clips are
quite good and are accessible through realaudio which has a free real
player (A well functioning Beta version) which can be downloaded from

    http://www.realaudio.com

Be careful in downloading to make sure you get the right version to fit
the winsock.dll file your ISP is using.  It is especially confusing with
AOL which has two versions of 3.0 : "AOL 3.0 for Windows" uses a custom
16-bit winsock.dll,  while the newer, downloadable "AOL 3.0 for Windows
95" uses a custom 32-bit Winsock.dll.

In any case, the new web page, put together by MBSI member, author and
researcher, Dr. Helmut Kowar and his talented colleagues and associates
is a very welcome new link into our world.  You'll enjoy it!

Frank Metzger

 [ MMD member Kowar is a musicologist at (in Austrian-German)
 [ Phonogrammarchiv der Oesterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften,
 [ Wien.  He would enjoy receiving e-mail at pharchiv@kfs.oeaw.ac.at
 [ -- Robbie