Roll translation software, Midi translation software, barrel translation
software, book translation software.  Translating this to that to some-
thing else.  We all wish we could do it.  Some of us can do it.  Many of
us think that if we invent the better mousetrap we will be able to reap
huge monetary rewards.

I too, have toyed with such fantasies.  My ideas have even been used 
by others to make things that work and they have achieved some monetary
return.  But, I have a news flash for all of us:  ** This is a small niche
of a small niche-market!**

First let us determine our market.  We have to find people who like piano
music.  That is only about 60% of the general public.  I hate to burst
your bubble, but there are actually people who don't give a damn about
anything related to pianos.  Believe it or not!

Second, we have to find people who want the piano to play for them.  
That is only about half of that 60%, whittling down our market to 30% 
of general public.

Third, we must find the people who like antique, obsolete, obscure,
unknown, popular, or classical music.  That whittles down the number 
to less than about 10% of the general public.

Next, from those people we must find those who have and will spend the
money to purchase our wondrous inventions, hardware, or software as well
as a good piano to play them on.  So we must find people who like obscure
music and who can afford the equipment to enjoy it being played for them
on their piano.  That whittles it down to....   **half of the number of 
people who make up the MBSI and AMICA put together!**

Lets face it, Gang, we all fit the above demographics; I certainly do.
But the rest of the world does not care and WILL not spend the money to
make any of us rich for building a wondrous system to do what we want 
to do using our rolls and our MIDI systems.

Our market is and for the foreseeable future will stay a small niche,
within a small niche, within an even smaller niche.  So, pretty much the
only people who will buy such wondrous systems as we can design and build
are the very people who are working on designing and building the same
sort of wondrous system.

If you are expecting large monetary reward, forget it.  Build it because
you must....and I know you MUST.  Share everything with everyone and let
us get ONE totally working wondrous computer system up and working at its
peak ability.  Give it to everyone and let us all convert our collections
to MIDI so we can recut *exact* copies of our beloved music-data (rolls,
barrels, books, whatever) because lets face it, our music-data exists on
borrowed time.

If you follow the efforts of Library of Congress to save hundreds of
thousands of crumbling books each year, you know that 90% of our paper
rolls and books have 5 years... 10 at the most,... 15 years if we are
lucky, before they totally decompose into powder.

If anyone opened any of the Sears Supertone piano rolls you have noticed
99% of them are gone totally.  You cannot even unroll them, they just
crumble.

Library of Congress throws away hundreds of thousands of the last
existing copies of books each year because they have no time nor money 
to digitize them.  Someone has to make the decision of which book to save
and which to toss out.  They have hundreds of people working all over the
country digitizing decomposing books, but there are many times more than
they could ever save.

Some that they would have liked to have saved are not salvageable.  They
are too far gone.  The problem is acid paper.  Guess what rolls are made
of:  Guess what brown pasteboard books are made of: *acid paper!*

A similar problem has destroyed 80% to 90% of all the silent movies ever
made.  Magnetic tape -- audio or video -- only lasts about 30 years.  We
think that recordings are forever.  Well, they are not.  We must restore,
reconstruct, recopy onto new media anything we think to be of value from
the past.

Anything that slows this down must end.  Whether it be a squabble between
two budding inventors or hackers or any number of things.  It could be
that one inventor lacks one piece of the puzzle that he cannot figure out
on his own.  There are probably six others in the same situation.

Now, between them all they have all the pieces needed for the ultimate
system;  however, they are all afraid that the next one might 'steal'
their idea.  This means the system never works right or takes years
longer to develop, and we just lost another thousand rolls that might
have been digitized, copied or saved, but weren't because of that extra
year it took to figure out the missing piece.

Let's develop the ultimate system to convert, translate, and save all our
roll collections as soon as possible.  

Monetary gain?  Forget it.  Once the system is up and running there might
be some monetary gain after it has been in use for a couple of years.
But that market will have to be cultivated.  You can't sell the system
only to the Amicans and MBSI'ers -- you know as well as I do most of them
(us!) are too cheap to spend the money anyway.

I think we really have a crisis today because none of the people who made
our favorite rolls knew that acid paper only lasted 80 to 120 years.

If there is to be any of our favorite music playing for our grandchildren
50 years from today, then all of us must get our noses out of the air and
down to the business of preservation.   

Let's get BUSY!

D. L. Bullock    Piano World    St. Louis

 [ Editor's note:
 [
 [ The services of PlayRite (John Malone) and Custom Music Rolls (Richard
 [ and Janet Tonnesen) have been been available -- for at least 15 years --
 [ for preserving music rolls via re-cut copies.  Their charges for these
 [ services seem reasonable, yet this *existing* preservation method has
 [ not been mentioned.  Why?  Is it because "the Fun is in the Chase?"
 [
 [ What incentive exists to reach the goal of *preservation*, and not
 [ simply experimenting?  Would anyone pay money for MIDI files of
 [ music rolls?  How much per song?  How big is the market?  How about
 [ counterfeit copies of the MIDI discs, being passed among friends?
 [
 [ Shellac phonograph discs, and perforated music rolls, were not easily
 [ copied, therefore the producer had no fear of losing his investment,
 [ and he made a profit -- the *incentive*.
 [
 [ How can a serious development project begin when there's a big
 [ possibility of losing the investment to illicit copies?
 [
 [ Robbie Rhodes