Dear friends,  A machine much like Tim is looking for is in use by
Mr. Pierre Charial, a professional music marker in Paris, France.
I had the opportunity to see it in service.

It consists of a normal single punch-and-die machine that slides over
the organ book and stops at exactly the places where a hole is needed.
The book is transported at a 90 degree angle to the punch, so it is
doing almost exactly what the old-fashioned foot punchers did from the
beginning of the 20th century.  It is rather slow, but it will work day
and night without much attendance.

The whole machine works with MIDI input, albeit via Cubase, but I don't
think that it will fail to respond to Cakewalk.

In the Netherlands and Belgium another type of automatic punching
machine is used, very much like the Limonaire machine I posted some
time ago (and the article can be found in Het Pierement 1999/4).
These machines work faster, but they can only punch books with a fixed
distance between the keys, so they will only cut Gavioli-style books.
You could ask Mr. Pluer of Bussum or Mr. Verbeeck in Belgium about the
costs; they have such machines working.

I will ask Mr. Charial how he got his machine, who has made it, and
what the costs are in France.  I will have to do that in French, so it
could take some weeks.  Maybe Philippe Rouille can be of assistance
too.

Merry Christmas from Holland,

Hans van Oost

P.S.: Be sure to keep your automatic musical instrument ready; it could
be the only musical device playing in the night of the millennium.  (-:

 [ I have placed a supply of candles nearby the foot-powered Pianola!
 [ -- Robbie