David Evans, in his comments in 110904 MMDigest, questions whether
MIDI converted rolls will be preserved "forever" as suggested by some.

I am with him on this one.  We at DeBence have remained "purists" in
that we play original or recut rolls on all our machines, and have no
plans to MIDI-ize any of them.

My personal experience in the engineering drafting area bears out his
suspicion.  The company I worked for did away with paper drawings in
favor of computerized records of parts.  The problem turned out to be
that 20 years later we had the digital records, but no software that
could read them.

If the MIDI files are not updated as software changes come along they
will be unreadable long before the paper rolls are unusable.

Scotty Greene
DeBence Antique Music World
http://www.debencemusicworld.com/ 

 [ I suspect the problem really was that the drawing software created
 [ data files in a proprietary, closely held format which could not
 [ be processed by software from other publishers.  In contrast, the
 [ data of Standard MIDI Files (SMF) is stored in a non-proprietary
 [ public format that all publishers are encouraged to write software
 [ for.  This is quite a different situation!  -- Robbie