Servicing Home organs in the future

[organtone]

I own a relatively new organ, a Roland Atelier AT800, which I hope will give reliable service. Historically I have repaired some fairly simple faults in previous organs, but as modern instruments become more complex software/ firmware items I believe the keys, touch screens and audio are all likely to wear, and suspect that as dealerships and manufacturers disappear, the support that a service engineer is likely to receive, will be minimal.
I troll through this message board, and observe many people seeking information to repair older instruments, and hope they succeed as I doubt there are many professional service engineers left. Could we not make this forum the source of a data bank that may help to preserve them before all the data has been trashed. I realise that in the past this information would be commercially sensitive but surely not now.

[Admin]

There is a category in the Gallery for Service and User Manuals for uploading and downloading. https://organforum.com/gallery/index.php?cat=4

There is also a section in the Forum for requesting service materials. https://organforum.com/forums/forum/...r-tech-manuals. Did you have something different in mind?

[organtone]

I have looked at these, and was dreaming of the gallery being much more comprehensive with an index (to include yamaha, roland, technics, farfisa, etc.etc which it doesn't.) It seems that a large majority of the requests have no response. I was perhaps suggesting that anyone who has service information on any organ might post it into a reference library, bequeath it to the world, before the inevitable house clearance! There are some technical challenges of format maybe, probably easier to do with jpeg than PDF but i'm not sure if that's feasible.

[myorgan]

I think you'll find that many of the requests did get responses, but they were handled via Private Message, as that is the appropriate method to share one's e-mail address (not in the public Forum areas). The other reason is because file sizes tend to be inordinately large, and the Forum isn't necessarily the best vehicle for transmitting large file sizes.

Welcome to the un-trolling part of the Forum!

Michael

[you795a]

Also, what about copyright? Much of documentation is copyrighted.

[Admin]

Copyright issues are certainly a factor in distributing this information publicly. In the US, and other nations adhering to the Berne convention, published after 1989 are automatically copyrighted whether or not a copyright is given. Prior that, in the US a copyright notice in the proper format had to be displayed. The format includes the copyright symbol or the word Copyright, the year of publication, and the identity of the copyright holder. For example © 2004 Kristofer Kolumbus. Regardless, there are exceptions even to valid copyrights such as Fair Use. In short copyright issues are complex.

[Admin]

The mechanism exists in the Gallery and the Forum to accomplish your dream, but it is up to the members of the Forum to make your dream come true.

Entries in the Gallery are categorized. As mentioned above, the Service and User Manuals is an appropriate category for such materials. It is possible to create sub-categories for specific brands under that parent if desired, or simply aggregate like material in a brand specific album under that category. Due to the current lack of entries, sub-categories have not been implemented, but should the need arise, could easily be and existing albums moved to them.

The Gallery currently supports these file types

image	jpeg/jpg/png/gif
video	asf/asx/mpg/mpeg/wmv/swf/avi/mov/mp4
audio	mp3/midi/mid/wma/wav/ogg/mp4
documents	doc/txt/rtf/pdf/xls/pps/ppt/zip/gz/mdb

Gallery and Forum content is indexed and tagged to facilitate search. A formal index would require a Wiki. The Organ Forum had a Wiki for several years. It took a lot of effort to set up and maintain, but was largely ignored and unused. After five years, I think it contained fewer than ten articles. Because of this and the increasing cost of licensing the Wiki software, it was decided it wasn't worth the effort. Its few articles were moved into the Forum and the Wiki was retired.

The Schematics, User & Tech Manuals Wanted channel of the Forum was created to centralize requests and responses for this information. Like the Gallery, it would be possible to further sub-categorize this channel into additional sub-channels for various brands, but I don't see a benefit in doing so. As myorgan said in his comment, many of the requests found there are responded to by private message and fulfilled via hardcopy sent by mail rather than electronically.

In summary, I fully agree with and support the idea of Organ Forum becoming a repository for this type of information. I believe that is possible given the current structure and capabilities of the Gallery and Forum, but it is up to the Forum community to submit the information. If you, or anyone reading this, wish to lead an effort to obtain this information, I'm here to assist you.

[organtone]

Thank you. That's really enlightening, hopefully mor member now realise what goes into the forum and what is possible
I'm sure there are forum members who have acquired tech documents of their own organs, or people who worked in the business who could contribute. Unfortunately that's not me, I'm a retired electronics engineer who thought (during my extended Covid 19 shielding ) that it would be a good idea to have some service information as insurance on my present instrument because it's probably going to be with me a long time, and it might give me a chance if it should go wrong. The retailer has already closed and Roland will have moved on.
Probably the only contribution I can make is what I've just done, hoping others become aware of what is possible.