Hear your melody on a virtual Muro Box N40 while composing

We are happy to announce a brand-new feature in our composer: a virtual Muro Box N40 simulator. While you are composing, you can now hear exactly how your melody would sound on a real mechanical music box — no downloads, no extra steps.

Just open the composer and press play in the simulator: it plays the melody you are currently editing on the chromatic F3–C7 scale of the Muro Box N40. Your changes are picked up automatically, so you can experiment with your arrangement and instantly hear the result.

The simulator is provided by our friends at Midimusic Theory and is completely free to use. We hope it helps you create even better paper strips — happy composing!

The must-read user guide for paper strip music boxes

We want to thank Hanneke Debie who wrote this extensive music box guide to include the most commonly asked questions about the paper strip music boxes, which are also known as “hand cranked music boxes” and “paper roll music box”.

In this guide, Hanneke tells us where you can find the paper strip music boxes, the types of them, how you can compose music for them and punch holes correctly, where to find melodies, how to repair the mechanical parts of the music box movement, and other tips and tricks learned from our MBM community. We would like to thank Hanneke Debie and other MBM members who have provided helpful resources to guide the newcomers of our community.

Muro Box

We are happy to announce our collaboration with the creators of Muro Box - the world's first app-controlled music box. It is a small, but very ambitious startup from Taiwan, where they had great success with their crowdfunding campaign. They have successfully built a prototype of the music box and their team is currently working really hard on making final adjustments to the product, in order to ship the first batch to their early bird supporters. In the mean time we've played around with the alpha version of their smartphone app and enabled melody export from our website into it.

Oh, and there are some rumours that Muro Box team is about to launch another crowdfunding campaign, this time on Indiegogo, so make sure to sign up for their newsletter to get updates directly from them. Cheers!

Similar melodies, new scales and melody requests

Some of you might have noticed that recently we introduced similar melodies detection. You can browse through similar melodies on the melody page and there is also a small counter in the melody player widget. The algorithm is comparing melody note sequences and does not care about titles, which among other things made this joke less funny.

Many people have complained that the actual scale of 30 note music box is shifted a few notes comparing to the scale on the paper strips provided with it. We've decided to fix this with an extra scale in our editor. It is called Grand Illusions 30 (F scale) or 30F. We've also added a custom 20 note scale for Wintergatan music box.

Please make sure to visit our melody request page. It has undergone significant changes.