Youtang Vintage Carved Wood 15 Note Mechanism Musical Box Handcrank Music Box Gift

OK, so you can go on Amazon and find the base metal pieces for the kit, so you know how much that costs. Given the price of this item, subtract the base cost and evaluate what you should expect It's not a $500 hand-tooled display piece. But for the price I was pleasantly surprised by how nice the box looks, and of course very happy that it works perfectly.

This product was a bit tricky to use at first, but once you get the hang of it, it’s very entertaining. My niece and me could spend hours playing songs through the music box. It’s much better than watching TV in my opinion. Definitely worth the money!

Bought this for a child. Very hard to accurately punch the notes even for me as an adult. Really wish some came prepunched. Otherwise perfect.

I love it! It's beautiful and good quality. Also the vendor responds every time. Great!

The media could not be loaded.  I'll start with the good: This is a really neat idea, and has the potential to be a really fun activity for fans of music and DIY gadgets alike. The tone of the music box keys is quite nice for the price and the 30-note range is nice and versatile. The box itself feels pretty cheap, but looks lovely on a shelf. The nylon gears have their issues, but while they make more noise than finely crafted brass gears would, they make less noise than you'd get from crappy brass gears, which are the only kind of brass gears that you could reasonably expect at this price point.The bad news is that there are several glaring user-friendliness issues that thoroughly dilute the above praises. Firstly, the hole punch is a piece of garbage, and I mean that almost literally: If I had just a shade less patience, it would've gone straight into the trash. (Though if I had just a shade more patience, I'd return it and buy one from another brand.) The actual punching part (the pointy cylinder that makes the holes, aka the "blade") is clearly supposed to be permanently attached to the base plate, but instead, it's just dropped into a hole and held in by friction, which is obviously not going to keep it in place when using the punch as intended. As a result, every few holes, the friction from the paper and the top plate will pull it right out of the base plate! Check out part 1 of my attached video to see what I mean.In addition, I find it ridiculous that this device could go through the design and testing process without anyone noticing how difficult it is to maintain the proper tempo with this nonsensical gear ratio: The hand crank has make about 29 rotations for every 24 beats, meaning the crank RPM must be 20% faster than the BPM of the song you're trying to play. Can you maintain a 120 BPM tempo while listening to a 100 BPM song? It's not easy! (Part 2 of my video shows this mismatch in action.)On a final note, I've got a few tips for anyone who wants to take the plunge anyway, or who's taken the plunge already and is just trying to get their money's worth:1. If your hole punch is broken in the same way mine is, hot gluing the blade into the base plate will (mostly) fix the issue, at least for a little while. You might get better results with stronger glue or JB Weld, but you'll likely want a less permanent solution in case you need to re-align it later. Speaking of which, be sure that immediately after applying the glue, you clamp the punch closed as if you'd just punched a hole; that way, you can make sure the glue dries with the blade aligned properly with the hole in the top plate (picture attached).2. Many other reviewers have pointed out that the note markings on the music strips seem nonsensical, out-of-order, and/or mismatched to what the music box actually plays. I'm not 100% sure--it's possible these reviewers received a different version of the strip than I did--but I suspect that the issue there is the fact that the sharp notes are marked very strangely: Typically, the # symbol would placed to the right of a note, or to the upper- or lower-right, like a superscript or subscript. On these strips, though, the # symbol is placed to the upper-left, which defies music notation conventions and can definitely lead to some mis-transcribed notes until you get used to it.3. Transcribing to the music tape can be a bit tedious, and as you go farther down the length and farther from the note labels, it can be easy to lose your place and end up with note-shift errors. One thing that makes transcribing a WHOLE lot less tedious and less error-prone is to cut off the tip of one of your blank strips and use it like a moving table of contents (picture attached). (If you're worried about wasting a perfectly good music strip by cutting off the start end, don't worry-- You can make use of it if ever you need to tape several strips together for a longer song, which you can see I did for part 3 of my video.)

The media could not be loaded.  Bought this for our daughter, but the punch is too stiff for her to accurately punch the music. I, however, have been having waaaaay too much fun playing with it. I need to order more music slips so I may continue converting my sheet music over. Possibly see if there are any longer slips.The video I’ve included is the first one I created from my personal stash of piano sheet music. It is not included in the set.

It doesnt play notes at the right time, completely skipping punched holes in cards tested against other music boxes

Yes you have to punch holes to all the songs and some of their titles are in Chinese, but what a great deal for personalized music! There are plenty of included songs and a hole puncher. If you have a special song of your own, you just need to read sheet music and be able to punch holes in the Treble Clef.

Die Spieluhr ist ok, man kann damit die verschiedenen, mitgelieferten Melodien abspielen und auch selber Melodien auf den Blanko-Papierstreifen herstellen. Die Qualität und der Klang der Spieluhr sind gut.Allerdings ist die Qualität der Vintage Holzkiste nicht so gut. Schon nach wenigen Benutzungen wackelte der Boden und die Benutzung war dadurch unmöglich. Ich habe dann Kontakt mit dem Verkäufer aufgenommen und nach vielen sehr schwierigen E-Mails (wegen Übersetzungsproblemen deutsch/chinesisch) hat man mir als Schadensausgleich noch 10 Blanko-Papierstreifen geschickt. Die Spieluhr habe ich aus der Holzkiste ausgebaut und benutze sie jetzt so. Ich empfehle also wer sich solch eine Spieluhr kaufen möchte, sie ohne Holzkiste zu kaufen.