Roland Ranfft (and database) news

Doubly sad news for the vintage watch world. According to a member on watchuseek, Roland Ranfft passed away earlier this year. I have noticed that his database/archive of movements had been down intermittently in recently months, but now it seems to be gone entirely.

I didn't know him well, but always enjoyed his slightly salty contributions on WUS, and the archive of watch movements that he created was just incredible, and irreplaceable. It was truly a major accomplishment, and something I used almost daily to identify movements and find details about various calibers.

March to be exact;

So it's true. May his memory be a blessing to his family and friends.

I keep the link in a tab next to this one. I use it weekly if not daily. Was my favorite rabbit hole. I still have a few movements I have not fully researched. Would be a terrible loss ...

Noticed that it is not working today. At least I have a bestfit pdf, but that is hard to search. And the copyright on that was clawed back.

I have been helping someone archive a music roll library. There was a chance I had a roll (mostly Funeral music.) they wanted me to scan. I asked them why? Said they wanted to preserve everything for future generations. They think such things will last forever. But that is not how preservation works.

There was a really great piano roll site 20 years ago. I think the guy died about 5 or so years back. No one could get into the database or the email group lists to add or delete members. That faded away with the rest of the Yahoo eGroups. I think the site was scraped and runs under a different host now without the mailing list. This sort of thing happens a lot. Especially when the focus is on selling soap. There are also huge collectors of copyrights who actively go after things. That site limited itself the music before a certain date in the 1920s. I think some of that is automated, so at the first of the year it releases more PD music.

Apple dropped the internal support for MIDI from Quicktime and iTunes. A lot of power has not forgotten what Napster did. The argument if the work is not paid for it will go away. Will be interesting how the writer/actor strike pans out. You tube shows there are many who would create their own alternative content. Most content is tightly controlled.

Looks like the net is heading in that direction where every thing is placed behind paywalled gardens. Subscription services may become the norm. Although hidden information available to a few may be more valued than information available to anyone.

Still I am an optimist and think things will work out in the long run.

The site that Luigi posted has scraped the data from Roland's archive, so at least the data are there, if not the full searching capability by various fields.