•Roger, did you seal the pouches? When I first joined the MMD I had your very problem but only with about 5 notes. They would work great as separate units but when assembled and on light pumping they would fail. I could not figure it out until I realized (with the advise from MMD members) that the s...

•I've been reading L. Douglas Henderson's discourse on the merits of pneumatic piano actions compared with those driven by solenoids, at www.wiscasset.net/artcraft/oldnews7.htm and would like to pose a few questions regarding this topic for the group to discuss if so inclined. As stated in Douglas's...

•Hi All, I'm not going to present my normal attitude concerning the deficiencies of solenoid operated player pianos. Instead, I'd like to present a thought concerning how to eliminate the inherent problems. Since the major drawback of any digitally controlled device is it's inability to perform more...

•Over the past few days the MMD has published some unusually harsh and strident criticism of me and my recently issued CD of Rachmaninoff's Ampico rolls. As one might expect from what is essentially a thinly- veiled attempt at character assassination, there has been no attempt to check even simple f...

•All this roll reading correspondence has been most interesting. I get the feeling that there is real progress, and look forward to having my own roll transcriber one day! In the meantime, a few ideas of my own... Jon Miller's question about the need for accuracy in roll transcrip- tions suggested n...

•For those MMD'ers interested in playing and/or creating electronic piano roll images or actually punching rolls, I offer two software products to accomplish this task. The "WindPlay" Roll Player "WindPlay" is used to play electronic roll images in various formats. The player accepts the file format...

•Synchronicity & Wurlitzer: a challenge for engineers For the past couple of months I have been designing a system to copy Wurlitzer style 165 rolls (and incidentally APP, Caliola, and other Wurlitzer rolls) that would replace the service once provided by Play-Rite Music Rolls, Inc. Good as availabl...

•Following recent discussions about this system, I was asked by Paddy Handscombe to check the spacing of notes across a Triphonola roll. The system controls expression with additional perforations outside the normal 88-note scale. Dan Wilson said in MMD 09.07.00 that these additional tracks are narr...

•Hi All, Bob Essex is correct, you can increase the power supply voltage of a stepping motor to get more speed. Let's say you are using five-volt one-ampere per phase motors. Increasing the supply voltage to ten volts will double the speed. In practice I use a twelve volt power supply on my five-vol...

•Grahame Code asked in 010628 MMDigest about a substitute motor in order to operate the Welte Vorsetzer from the 240 vac mains in Australia. Aspects to consider include cost, availability, ease of installation, range of speed adjustment, and noise (hum). These options are conceivable: 1. If the exis...

•This is a follow-up to the discussion in MMD last June and July about a replacement motor for a Welte Vorsetzer. It also applies to any Red Welte piano, where two pump motor speeds are required. For $119.95 + shipping, a surplus house is selling a Minarik XL3025 adjustable speed drive for DC brush ...

•This is a follow up to my piece in 011103 MMDigest, titled "Replacement Motor for Welte Vorsetzer". Before those of you without Red Welte equipment tune out, let me say that for anyone who has a reproducing piano without the original motor, using a DC motor and the Minarik Adjustable Speed Drive mi...

•To keep this from becoming a rehash of the myriad "my computer is better than your computer" discussions which may be found littering the web, might I suggest limiting comments to personal experiences with the platform with which we are familiar? Speculation about how the other half lives will inev...

•WEB file format is a record of the location of the holes in the music roll. Its purpose is to control a perforator which has all the punches lying along a straight line. The WEB file is creating by transcribing the music roll using a linear hair-line height tracker bar or a line scanning camera. BA...

•I have followed with interest the thread that has developed in the wake of my MMD posting of 10 September, 2003, suggesting that telephone technology might have played a role in the early Welte recording process. Opinions expressed have varied widely, and I believe certain items stated as facts in ...

•Greetings, I have written a couple of utilities for the purpose of examining, editing and repairing web lengths in MIDI files. GapFinder is a windows program that can be used on single files as well as whole folders of them, in batch mode. A threshold level (in milliseconds) is set and a log file i...

•It would be nice to have two notations of this roll. One the actual note for note piano roll transcription, and then a second edited arrangement that allows an advanced pianist to accomplish the piece while at the same time preserves the characteristics of the piano roll performance. I have used Ca...

•It is encouraging that the organizers of the upcoming AMICA convention have shown their support for archival preservation of music rolls via roll scanning. Both Jack Breen and I will be conducting workshops within which a roll scanner will be featured. Jack and I are cooperating, so that our presen...

•Hello, I started a perforator a while ago that is similar to the MIDster but was intended to hold several punches for different formats or to speed the perforating process by limiting the carriage travel. I never finished it. I have offered the "as is" unit to a friend who intends to finish it. I h...

•My perforating setup is fully equipped to cut new rolls from MIDI files, and I'm happy to do one-off batches of four rolls! To keep things really simple there's a flat price of GBP 8 each up to 30 feet long (plus post at cost from the UK). Although it's apparently easy to convert MIDI to rolls ther...