I clicked on the link guessing, and then hoping, that it would have MIDI files of the piano rolls. Not so, but archive.org has at least 14,233: https://archive.org/details/pianorollmusic.com-midifiles
I clicked on the link guessing, and then hoping, that it would have MIDI files of the piano rolls. Not so, but archive.org has at least 14,233: https://archive.org/details/pianorollmusic.com-midifiles
I found the link because I was curious if player piano rolls could record live playing. Yes.
What sparked my curiosity is 21 Pianomation Floppy disks that arrived yesterday with a recently eBay’d Yamaha Midi Data Filer 3. Pianomation is a system QRS corporation fits on grand pianos to allow them to operate as player pianos.
QRS is still in business and started out making piano rolls around 1900 and quickly invented a machine to record pianists live performances. https://www.qrsmusic.com/
Anyway, the floppy disks are approximately album length collections of Midi files and quite a few of the Midi files say who played the piano. Given when some of the players died, the Midi is almost certainly converted from piano rolls.
I’ve been playing them back through a Yamaha General Midi era piano voice…and $10,000 hands on a two dollar guitar surely does sound better than two dollar hands on a $10,000 guitar.
But Liberace might be spinning in his grave…I ran his data into the Honky Tonk Piano.
I love this background information. I hope you’re backing up those MIDI files!
Probably not.
I expect to test the rest of them…I suspect they all work…then resell them on eBay.
Backing up data is not a hobby that interests me, hard copy rolls exist, the company is still in business, and the files are still under copyright.
> but Liberace might be spinning in his grave
At 10000 rpm, not one less.
Not 78?
Fun trivia about piano rolls and copyright which us software nerds might find interesting:
"White-Smith Music Publishing Company v. Apollo Company, 209 U.S. 1 (1908), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States which ruled that manufacturers of music rolls for player pianos did not have to pay royalties to the composers."
"The main issue was whether or not something had to be directly perceptible (meaning intelligible to an ordinary human being) for it to be a "copy."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-Smith_Music_Publishing_C...
> "The main issue was whether or not something had to be directly perceptible (meaning intelligible to an ordinary human being) for it to be a "copy."
Why doesn't the same argument apply to a CD? or an MP3?
A CD and MP3s consist of recorded performances. A player piano roll contains the instructions for a performance, basically a transcription of sheet music, or a recording of someone performing a work. (Didn't read court findings for scope.)
Works (sheet music and lyrics) and recordings (committing it to media or storage) and performances can be distinctly copyrighted and separately licensed. But a CD track represents all 3 of those put together through “sweat of the brow”, usually by multiple parties.
Not strictly true. Player piano rolls were not made by mechanical transciption; a human actually played the music into a recording device (at least towards the end of the era). Because of this, we have a "recording" of Scott Joplin playing one of his rags. Dynamics are not preserved, but actual timing is.
> “This case was subsequently eclipsed by Congress's intervention in the form of an amendment to the Copyright Act of 1909, introducing a compulsory license for the manufacture and distribution of such "mechanical" embodiments of musical works.”
Any idea how they generate these? It seems like you could unroll a piano roll, scan it optically, and generate MIDI from it, but I'm having trouble searching because "MIDI" + "piano roll" leads only to piano rolls in digital audio workstations.
Looks like the magic word is "digitize", and yes, it's a thing - see e. g. https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~kittyshi/pianoroll/pianoroll.htm...