I was curious what this nonsense looks like - and found out that the $5k is the preorder price. It goes up to $5600 once its shipping.
Looking at it in their videos it just reminds me of every “Robot turns bad and kills everyone” story. Just needs red eyes to replace blue.
Yeah everything is a player (including the piano), and aside from the instruments themselves there are hundreds of rolls - originals (which my kids saw how they are made with an old Mr. Rogers episode I put on for them), customs my FIL made of his own music, and some modern pop we’ve picked up for them.
And yep, AMICA is a great option, my FIL is a member still I think. We are definitely going to take at least one of them, I have a feeling it will be the big pneumatic upright. Which I’m prepping a controller conversion for to allow him to do midi with it to test playback before making a new roll. The controls all work but I need to replace one of the relays…
And now you know why that’s the one we’ll likely end up taking (and its also one of the bigger ones).
Now that’s the kind of thing my wife would love to have. Maybe at some point we’ll take away someone else’s space occupier.
We’ve got a few pieces of furniture, the one in really not looking forward to is the musical instruments. We’re talking full grand piano, player piano, pneumatic uprights, etc. They are huge. There is no way my wife won’t want at least one, and I’m probably the only one who knows how to do the maintenance despite it being her parents stuff and she has a few siblings.
If its for work, its on a work machine.
That said, I have a lot of efforts (personal projects with hardware I get given, or side work not related to my job) where I need specific software. For those, I have a VM tailored to that application that’s been trimmed down as much as possible.
This let’s me rdp into them, do what I need to do, save to a designated location, and shut the VM down. Since its a VM I tend not to give it network access unless required, and I have USB drive I pass through to the VM.
This makes sure everything works, I limit the access of MS with local only accounts and win 10 (among other specific versions like XP for a specific piece of hardware, server 2008 for an irritating piece of software I sometimes need, etc).
All the VMs are on my proxmox cluster, easy to start/stop with a script.