I haven't introduced myself here.  I'm Bill Chapman, and member
of both AMICA and MBSI.  I was told about this area by Jim
Heyworth, who was poking around with his new Pentium and located
this area.  I am just a little nutty over reproducing pianos,
and am always twiddling the controls to make them play just a
little better.  I have a Weber Duo Art, and an upright AMPICO,
et al.
   My chief interest right now is turning toward interfacing the
pianos with the computer, and hopefully reading rolls into the
computer using the midi format.  From there they could be edited
to correct errors, particularly on the rolls that are re-cut
copies.  Another possibility would be to add expression to some
 88 note rolls.
   An earlier post mentioned a sonic roll reader concept (I cant
scroll back to get the man's name) but that struck me and rather
ingenious, since the paper passing over the holl in the tracker
bar reader  would seal it off from noise, and at particular
frequencies, might be very effective.  Earlier I had thought of
using light readers, since there are very small light detectors
that could fit in a tracker bar with the help of a little glass
fiber.
  However, I came across office paper scanners in a store
recently, and it looks light they may do the job as well.  They
are made for the purpose of putting text or pictures into digial
form.  Some have optical character recognition programs, which
suggests that the data from the scanned document may be
manipulated. The last generation of paper scanners are very
small an inexpensive.  The trouble is, they are made for regular
office paper and scan only 8.5 inches wide.  I haven't found
specs on them yet, but one suggested it would only scan 30" in
length, to correspond with newspaper length.  Perhaps the
program could be modified to scan continuously.  I'm checking
now to see if any are made to scan older accounting ledgers,
which were often very wide.  The one that I am now exploring is
Visioneer.  I'll be writing to the company to suggest my use and
see what they say.  If I find others interested I'll post more
info.  My though s that tattered rolls could be transferred to
disk, thus preserving some of the literature for players and
reproducers.