Old Music Box EDELWEISS Records

	318 : ALEXANDER'S RAGTIME BAND (label = 1) MP3 recording , Optical Scan (JPG) , DiskOCR's Midi rendition , MIDI to MP3 conversion .
	? : ??? (label = 2) MP3 recording , Optical Scan (JPG) , DiskOCR's Midi rendition , MIDI to MP3 conversion .
	59 : AM WEINACHTSBAUM (label = 3) MP3 recording , Optical Scan (JPG) , DiskOCR's Midi rendition , MIDI to MP3 conversion .
	? : ??? JACK'S THE BOY (label = 4) MP3 recording , Optical Scan (JPG) , DiskOCR's Midi rendition , MIDI to MP3 conversion .
	459 : WIEN ??BLAND' ?? (label = 5) MP3 recording , Optical Scan (JPG) , DiskOCR's Midi rendition , MIDI to MP3 conversion .
	170 : LITTLE ??? RONEY (label = 6) MP3 recording , Optical Scan (JPG) , DiskOCR's Midi rendition , MIDI to MP3 conversion .
	31 : STILLE NACHT (label = 7) MP3 recording , Optical Scan (JPG) , DiskOCR's Midi rendition , MIDI to MP3 conversion .
	10 : DER KLEINE ?OHN (label = 8) MP3 recording , Optical Scan (JPG) , DiskOCR's Midi rendition , MIDI to MP3 conversion .
	57 : WILHELMUS VON NASSAU (label = 9) MP3 recording , Optical Scan (JPG) , DiskOCR's Midi rendition , MIDI to MP3 conversion .
	56 : ??? (label = 10) MP3 recording , Optical Scan (JPG) , DiskOCR's Midi rendition , MIDI to MP3 conversion .
	753 : KASINO LIED (label = 11) MP3 recording , Optical Scan (JPG) , DiskOCR's Midi rendition , MIDI to MP3 conversion .
	315 : RAGTIME VIOLIN (label = 12) MP3 recording , Optical Scan (JPG) , DiskOCR's Midi rendition , MIDI to MP3 conversion .

Some of these iron disks are damaged or covered with rust. Hence it was not always possible to decipher the record's number or the title of the song. Needless to say that the quality of these recordings is poor, if measured with nowadays (CD) standards. However, given the technology of that time, I think they sometimes represent a remarkable achievement, if judged from an purely artistic point of view.

Convert to Midi with : DiskOCR

All songs have been converted to (more or less) equivalent Midi files, by making an Optical Scan of the disks and determining the coordinates of the holes in the disk. A mathematical model of the MusicBox was built into the DiskOCR program, which interprets these coordinates in terms of duration and tone heights. The output of (the last version of) the program is a Standard Midi File.
(The coordinates of ALEXANDER'S RAGTIME BAND were done by hand, originally, because I wanted to be sure that the recipe would work !)

Here comes the list of original (300 DPI) scans of the above EDELWEISS records:
1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 .
Download the executable. Then convert a sample Optical Scan of an iron disk from the above JPG list to BMP, kindly remove labels 1 .. 12 (with Microsoft Paint for example) and try for yourself. Or rather use a (much bigger) sample from the corresponding ZIP of BMP images, the advantage being that they can be used for rendering immediately.

In case you want to OCR your own (EDELWEISS) disks, the following recommendations are issued:

Clean your disks thouroughly before feeding them into a scanner
Preferrably use perfectly white paper as a background for each disk
Make sure that any background contacts the "smooth" side of the disk as tightly as possible
Prepare a scan of the side with the pins on it, that is : not of the opposite (smooth) side
Mark each background with an unique label, which is also to be scanned (and erased later on)
Gray valued, 300 DPI (JPG) scans are necessary and sufficient for our purpose
After conversion, the resulting BMP files should not even have a higher resolution than 600 * 800
Take care of proper (re)naming of the BMP files (according to the scanned background labels)
After all, remove the the labels in the BMP files and eventually clean up dark spots (with Microsoft Paint for example)

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