Wayne Stahnke wrote:

> I suggest that you
> take the time to pull the file up on your computer screen and examine it
> carefully with a copy of the roll (and a straightedge) at hand.  You will
> find that all of the perforations are at their correct places, as determined
> by counting punch steps.  A new roll made from this file would be identical
> to a roll made in the 1920s.

Well, I uudecoded and pkunzipped and got the MIDI file 68283b.mid.  Now what
do I do with it ?   If I look at it with my antique "Cakewalk" I will go
blind or, more realistically, not-so-quietly crazy before I can determine
the accuracy of the work.

How should I go about doing this in a sane fashion ?

I _know_ I shouldn't have tried to "play" it, but I did anyway.  Yes it is
the right "Menuet" all right, but it comes over like a Duo-Art roll played
on an Ampico at tempo 800.  I can see that the expression perforations are
at both ends of the tracker scale as expected, but that is about all.

> We have been entrusted
> with a precious legacy, and we have a duty to preserve and protect it.
> Preservation of the performances on these rolls must not be corrupted by
> scanner errors, or we will have failed to live up to our responsibility to
> the artists and engineers who created them, and to future generations of
> listeners.

I still have this queasy, uneasy feeling that data and software formats in
general seem to have a considerably shorter lifetime than piano rolls.  How
are we to assure that 100 years from now the files will still be in usable
form ?  ie. Will some poor soul be confronted with the problem of converting
what will then be the equivalent of a deteriorating 135K floppy disc into
the then current working format ?  Remember, we _were_ happy with 135K
floppies 15+ years ago!  Another example: Pianocorder tapes are beginning to
fall apart already.

Please don't take this as undue criticism of a lot of hard and very
worthwhile work. I am just concerned that something very fundamental may be
missing from this equation and we are caught up in the technology without
taking adequate note of some of its very basic limitations.

Perhaps if there are any librarians or conservators on the list they may
have some comments ?

Jim Heyworth --- james_heyworth@sunshine.net