Friday, January 26, 2007

Listen to Old Piano Rolls on your computer

Also from Howard Levitsky:

http://www.trachtman.org/rollscans

A good friend of mine has posted on his website MIDI files of player piano rolls he has optically scanned and converted, using software he developed. It's an enormous project, also involving recutting rolls that would otherwise be lost to age and damage. He's got close to 2000 titles so far, carefully indexed and sortable in many ways. (Only the titles in public domain are publically downloadable.) I've attached 4 of them: Gershwin playing "Swanee", Zez Confrey playing his "Kitten on the Keys" and two other songs played by the famous 2-piano team Arden and Ohman. They'll play on Quicktime or any other MIDI-playing application.

My friend, BTW, is an MIT-trained engineer... And one of the Good Guys. This project is a hobby and he's made the results available to all.

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