Spencer Chase Laser Perforator Shenanigans No. 2

Well, unfortunately I've been stalled for months at this point
on producing custom roll recuts. My main computer decided to die
(or at least the keyboard and touchpad are starting to go and the
"Blue Screen of Death" appears every few minutes) and with it died
the COMDLG.OCX file that Perforation Editor needs registered to run.

It took me two hours to register that file and now that the
computer has died I have two other machines that don't have that
file registered which means I'm totally unable to master new rolls
until I figure out how to register said files.

Before that happened, though, I was experimenting with using a smaller
hole radius for Gcode masters and I did a test cut of Atlas 3975,
"Happy Days Are Here Again", (the infamous roll that everyone wants
me to cut and yet I still have failed to deliver in over 3 months
at this point) with a hole radius of 0.66 mm, smaller than Ampico's
0.75 mm radius and about the same size as QRS's current punch size.

I was able to shorten the roll master further by converting it to
30 punches per inch from the original 24 (had to go to 28 first to
get bridging right and then went shorter to save paper further) and
now with the smaller hole radius I think I could go _even shorter,
as the bridging is too thick with the smaller holes again.

The roll Tempo on the test cut (played on my 1912 Conway, anyway)
was about 45 (compare that to the original tempo of 75). The roll
actually played decently despite some side-to-side wander that I have
been defeated by trying to correct. I just need to calibrate the
width one more time as I'm a bit narrow again and once that's done
I just need to get the software working again for mastering rolls.

From what I could gather playing that test roll, when played on a
piano with leaky pouches, the smaller hole size may impact performance
a little with repeating notes but nothing too bad. (If your piano can
play QRS's new production rolls then it can play the 0.66 mm hole
laser cut rolls with no problem.) However, what this will improve
significantly is the roll lengths, cutting times, and also wind motor
air use.

Because the Tempos will be cut in half or so (this shouldn't impact
playback of crescendos on Ampicos as the crescendos are appropriately
scaled and the smaller holes will give more precision at low paper
speeds) the wind motor will be using less air allowing the player
pianist to get far more control over dynamics without running out of
air because of the wind motor consuming all the vacuum from the pump.

Also, I may be able to cut longer medley rolls because of this roll
length compression method, so I'm going to email Spencer right now
and ask if there's any way we could make it so that the first MIDI
file processed with the Gcode converter will result in a file that can
then have the next MIDI file tacked onto it, and so on and so forth
until the last file in the roll is specified which will then have the
trailing segments cut.

This should make it trivial to just make 100 foot long medley rolls
that fit twice as much music on them!

Piotr Barcz
Upstate New York