Peter Phillips Tape Converter for Ampico
By John Burton
Regarding "Computers Playing Reproducing Pianos" in Digest 961218: The Peter Phillips system was called the Tape Converter. The original system, one of which I owned for a few years, used a standard cassette recorder/player to play the tapes at normal tape speed. The tapes contained Ampico roll image data, the roll being sampled 50 times per second. The data controlled solenoid valves that were teed at the back of the tracker bar, the latter being covered by the leader of a stationary roll.
Peter later upgraded the system to its present state wherein the data is stored on computer floppy disk. The data from these disks is fed from an Apple IIE computer to the piano electronics, the computer system giving a much speedier selection of the required tune. I still own a number of these tapes. It could be interesting to convert some to MIDI format, but it may not be as easy as it sounds.
Peter now owns a PianoDisk system and therefore will not be producing any more tape converter systems or disks/tapes for the present systems.
John Burton
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(Message sent Fri 20 Dec 1996, 09:34:07 GMT, from time zone GMT-1000.) |
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