So far I have been watching this list growing without contributing. Now I will 
introduce myself briefly. Thanks for putting me on the list.

  My name is Zoltan Janosy. I'm currently a postgraduate student of the
Technical University of Budapest, Hungary. During my undergraduate studies I
got involved with reproducing piano rolls. A researcher from the Institute of
Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Janos Macsai, asked me if I
would be interested in converting reproducing piano rolls to electronical
format, suitable for doing later studies of the recorded performances. I was
interested, and finally I wrote my Master's Thesis about computer processing
of reproducing piano rolls. At that time we didn't know about anyone doing
similar work. The method we used was to scan the rolls with a high-resolution
drum-scanner, process the resulting file on a computer (extract the hole
position information), then convert the data to MIDI. We had the possibility
to experiment with a Yamaha Disklavier as well. Our goal was to get the best
possible restoration of the original performance. We focused on the Welte
Mignon rolls, for we had access to several hundreds of them at the Museum of
the History of Music.
  We processed a few rolls with surprizingly good results. We made sound 
recordings of the performances using the Disklavier. We presented our results 
at the 1994 February Audio Engineering Society Convention in Amsterdam. This 
paper is available in electronical format from:

ftp://bme-tel.ttt.bme.hu/pub/incoming/pianorol

See the file readme.txt for more details about the files contained there. There 
is also a sample MIDI file available, Ernest von Dohnanyi (a famous Hungarian 
pianist) playing Liszt's (a famous Hungarian-born composer) XIII. (Hungarian)
Rhapsody. (I had reports about problems with loading this file into Cakewalk 
and other sequencers. It should work fine with MasterTracks or Cubase.)

We have good contacts with several European collectors, including Mr. Hans-W. 
Smitz, who is probably the most knowledgeable authority in the field of the 
German Welte Mignon reproducing pianos.

Zoltan

-------- (Mr.) Zoltan Janosy <janosy@tsys.hit.bme.hu> ------ #8^) ---------¶
Technical University of Budapest, Hungary, Department of Telecommunications¶
Sztoczek u. 2. 308., H-1111 Budapest,  t: +36-1-463-2093, f: +36-1-463-3266

    [ Editor's Note:  As of the time of my editing, the correct URL
    [ is actually:
    [              ftp://bme-tel.ttt.bme.hu/pub/income/pianorol
    {
    [ For those of you who don't have a web browser, this is the
    [ equivalent of anonymous ftp to bme-tel.ttt.bme.hu
    [ ( aka  152.66.87.102  or  152.66.87.162  )
    [ The files are in the /pub/income/pianorol directory:
•[ Mar 23  1994  Zip File         aes94rtf.zip  81Kb
[ Mar 29  1994  Zip File         aes94txt.zip  16Kb
[ Mar 23  1994  Zip File         aes94ww2.zip  70Kb
[ Mar 23  1994  Zip File         aes94ww6.zip  70Kb
[ Mar 23  1994  Zip File         prolld.zip    29Kb
[ Mar 23  1994  text/plain       readme.txt    1Kb
•    [
    [  Jody