I've been taking a bit of non-available free time to listen to ragtime
piano as presented on YouTube.  It seems to fall into various degrees
of failure.

Some of the hand-played music is good, some poor.  There are
various sad pianos that need a tech or a tuner, and a few good ones.
Recordings from ragtime festivals are generally worth listening to,
because they have performers anywhere from competent to superb, playing
grand pianos in good shape.  Some mike placement at festivals is bad.

There are a few "here's my player piano" clips.  They tend to be awful,
with bad tuning, bad rebuilds, bad mike placement, no expression, and
even some very bad lighting.  I'm afraid that to me they all seem to be
"Here's how my vacuum-cleaner plays my piano!"

What's missing is any substantial population of videos where someone
is running a properly rebuilt foot-pumped straight player, pedaled with
expression.

*This is a threat!*  If some good-looking person with a recently tuned
piano doesn't put up a good performance of some foot-pumped ragtime
(con molto espressione), then *I'll do it,* and you'll all be sorry!

Seriously, what shows up now on YouTube is a bad representation of the
player piano.  Perhaps some of us might have something worthwhile to
offer.

Peter Neilson