We are excited to announce that our closest partner Muro Box, who has a successful Kickstarter campaign that reached their funding goals in the first 2 hours!
Now, you can hear the live performance of your MBM melodies on a real mechanical music box, “Muro Box-N40” anytime, anywhere!
Check out their Kickstarter campaign page to hear the live performance of Muro Box-N40 by watching its live stream video. The instructions of online test playing N40 is under the section title “24hrs Open for Testing Online” in this story page of this Kickstarter campaign page.
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.
We are very excited to announce that our closest partner Muro Box has launched an Indiegogo campaign! In case if you missed it, Muro Box is the world’s first app-controlled mechanical music box, that can play unlimited melodies and has a variety of really cool features.
After their first successful crowdfunding campaign in Taiwan they spent almost 2 years in the pilot run production, and now when the final batch of the music boxes has been successfully produced and shipped to their first backers, they are launching a global campaign.
If you would like to learn more about the team behind this truly unique project and their journey, we strongly recommend checking out their story. It was quite a fascinating journey.
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!
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.
We would like to invite you to visit our new forum page! Currently, the functionality is pretty basic, so you can't post anything other than plain boring text and links, but we plan to start gradually improving it in near future if it appears to be popular among our users.
By default you will be notified about posts, that are submitted by people you follow, but you can always opt in for receiving notifications about every new forum post in your notification settings. We would like everybody to consider this, because there will be questions about music boxes and the website in general and many of you already have enough experience to help the others.
Huge thanks to all current and future contributors!
We've suddenly realized, that the audience of our lovely website is becoming very international, so we've added a world map of our users to the home page. In case if you haven't seen it yet, go check it out, it's under the featured video widget. It's truly amazing to see you all, thank you for being with us! Oh, and if you'd like to update or hide your location, you can do it in your profile settings.
Many of you have reported an issue with paper strip music boxes not playing repetitive notes when they are too close to each other. We've reproduced the problem and unfortunately it looks like it's one of the limitations of the mechanism design. From now we highlight such notes with red color in the online editor and also when you export melodies to PDF. Hopefully, this small improvement will help you to identify the problem earlier.
As some of you might have already noticed, it is now possible to sign in to our website with login and password in addition to social authentication, which we had previously. This is something many people have requested, so we are really happy to finally add this feature. If you are using a social network account to login to music box maniacs and would like to switch to login and password authentication, simply visit your settings page and set a password for your account.
Make sure to check special offers in our store. Many sellers have already updated the prices because of the upcoming Black Friday, so if you are considering to order a DIY music box as a Christmas gift for your relatives or friends, it's perfect time to do that before they run out of stock.
Make sure to checkout the awesome video instruction Eugene Kazantsev has made. You can find it on our videos page or watch it directly on YouTube. A few words about Eugene: he is originally from Ukraine, has been making music for a very long time, plays in Bryats Band, and loves music boxes. If you'd like Eugene's help with making a custom melody for your music box, you can find links to his Fiverr gigs in his profile.
We greatly appreciate what Eugene does to our small DIY Music Box community, wish him best of luck with his music and hope you will help us with sharing his video instruction. Cheers!
With a great help of joebalint we've added export to AutoCAD DXF format. This should save some time for those of you, who are lucky enough to own a CNC router, laser or vinyl cutter. Here is a short video of the test cutting. Please be aware, that this format is still in testing mode, so if you experience any issues with file import, measurements or anything else don't hesitate to drop us a message.
We are really eager to see this feature in action, so we would really enjoy to see some videos of the cutting process. Cheers!
