Bob Billings sez: " -Sigh-  Perfection eludes us again. "

Wayne Stahnke sez: " Getting too technical for many readers. "

Don't fret, folks, just continue doing your best.  Ten years ago, I
published an appeal in the AMICA Bulletin trying to encourage the use of
computers to protect for all time the content of rapidly decaying paper
music rolls.  I still have a significant number of old green box Ampico
rolls in theoretically good condition, but I don't dare play them.  They
are really only good for one last pass through some kind of scanner.

I'm absolutely delighted that there are now a host of people out there
tackling this challenge and coming up with excellent solutions.  Bob is
right on the mark encouraging development and acceptance of worldwide
standards. and the excellence of Wayne's accomplishments is most
encouraging.

True, as a non-engineer, some of the MMD discussion is over my head, but
I'm very much aware of the need to share this information as a widespread
refinement process.  Just seeing it happening is ample reassurance that
perhaps one day a lightweight low-cost truly portable reader will be
developed that can be moved around from one large collection to another
to capture and forever protect fragile music-roll data.

I sincerely hope that such data might one day be freely available on some
large Internet site to facilitate interested persons to continue making
high quality new recuts of the old rolls at reasonable cost, particularly
to those of us outside the USA.

I applaud and fully support the development work continuing to be shared
through MMD, an absolutely first-class method of gluing us all together
in one very fine neighborhood.

Regards,

Terry Smythe                   smythe@mts.net
55 Rowand Avenue               smythe@freenet.mb.ca
Winnipeg, MB, Canada  R3J 2N6  (204) 832-3982 (voice/fax)
http://www.winnipeg.freenet.mb.ca/~smythe