I want to recommend two newly-available products:  Wayne Stahnke's
Ampico CD ROM and Richard Brandle's "WindPlay" program.   Used
together, they provide a huge quantity of wonderful music at a very
reasonable price.

Wayne's CD ROM contains .bar and .ann files for 460 Ampico A and B
rolls.  It comes with a DOS program called "Audition" which plays a
.bar file -- although without expression -- on an external MIDI device
connected to a PC.

WindPlay is a user-friendly Windows program which lets you load a .bar
file by double-clicking on it.  Upon loading, WindPlay displays the
title, composer and other information about the roll.  Double-click on
the title and WindPlay plays the roll -- with expression -- on your sound
card or external MIDI device while displaying the roll passing over the
tracker bar.  I have grand piano with PianoDisc, and the music sounds
terrific.

WindPlay also lets you create and save play lists (I loaded and saved
all of the .bar files on the CD ROM for easy access) and it has other
features not discussed here.  I think WindPlay requires at least a
Pentium 133 and 32 megs of RAM.

Wayne's Ampico CD ROM is $89.95 and his e-mail address is
<Stahnke@idt.net>.  Richard's WindPlay program is $49.95 and his
e-mail address is <rbrandl@us.ibm.com>.

The CD ROM and WindPlay are neat as individual products, but
together they are synergistic.  If I had a tail, they'd make it wag.

Mike Ryan