Hi Robbie and MMDers, Greetings from Australia.  I have just finished
installing a Bob Hunt "VirtualRoll" system in my 88-note Beale pianola.

The system worked perfectly at first switch-on.  The sense of relief
(even joy) is hard to describe!  I have posted a high definition video
on YouTube at  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJr7eI1yf0k
 

I am a bit apprehensive about giving this video to the MMD fraternity
in view of all the criticism directed at the noisy pianola referred to
by Bernt Damm (and it wasn't even his).  The suction source is a _new_
240-volt Electrolux vacuum cleaner motor mounted in a wooden box
glued to a piece of carpet for sound isolation.  Old vacuum cleaner
motors have too much bearing noise.

The motor is throttled way back with a 2000 watt triac-based fan
controller (phase shifted, I think).  It just idles over.  You can hear
the noise at the start and end of the video.  It is very quiet, and
that's without the lower panel in place.  It has a potentiometer for
speed control which will control the motor from barely able to play a
note to about 40% of maximum possible suction.  At 40%, the piano is
very loud -- not quite as loud as you can get by pedaling very hard --
I didn't want to stress the old girl.

To achieve very low speed operation of the (much-too-big) vacuum
cleaner motor, as an after-thought, I rectified the AC output of the
speed controller to 240V DC just using a diode bridge and a 50 uF
non-polarised motor start capacitor.  This made a huge difference to
the smoothness of low speed operation.  The metal silver box contains
the rectifier.  I haven't yet gotten around to painting it.  The player
piano still functions perfectly as a pedaled roll player.

The software running the VirtualRoll is van Basco's karaoke player,
available free on the Internet.  As you can see, it works very well
and has a great facility for creating multiple playlists.  You could
set the thing to play forever, never having to change another roll.

The MIDI file, "A Fool Such as I", was obtained from Robert Perry's
wonderful collection of scanned rolls in New Zealand.  I inserted the
lyrics into the MIDI file using Spencer Chase's Lyric Adder program.
Spencer is doing good work on this program at the present time to make
it significantly easier to use.

I hope this posting might encourage others to do what I have done.
There is a huge collection of scanned piano rolls available on the
Internet for playing in the VirtualRoll system.  I also hope that some
people might use their spare time to take up the task of adding lyrics
to the MIDI files.  It's quite an enjoyable process but it takes a bit
of time.

A note about the audio quality of the video.  I recall some time back
someone lamenting the fact that it is difficult to capture good audio
from player pianos.  I just used a new Panasonic HDC-SD900 video camera.
Panasonic have done a lot of work towards improving the audio recording
of their domestic video cameras.  I think the audio is pretty good, as
is the hi def 1920x1080i video; you should expand it to full screen to
see the benefit of uploading hi def video to YouTube.  To setup for
this recording, I turned off the cameras audio AGC and cut the audio
input by 12 decibels in the setup.

If anyone wants advice from my experience, please don't hesitate to
email me.

Regards,
Geoff Ward
Sydney