>> My suspicion is that the sustain tracks were often poorly edited.

Since my latest additions to my roll-making endeavors are now including
sustain pedal coding, I believe I can say that it's very tricky to do
right.  In fact, as Wayne Stahnke pointed out to me, most QRS pop rolls
use it sparingly, if at all.

There are two reasons that I've discovered so far.  One is that the onset
and release is unpredictable from one piano to another, so if you are
trying to do some tricky pedal effects, it will most likely come off as
mush.  It's better to bleed the notes and sacrifice the resonance.

The second is that using the sustain, especially in arpeggios, makes them
a lot louder than one would expect.  It can be positively ugly.

So what I'm trying now is to use very short sustain hits, well inside the
notes to be sustained (starting at least one row after the start of the
section to be sustained, and at least one row before the end).  Also,
more bleeding in tricky parts.

The QRS Christmas roll uses more pedaling than I've done before, and it
came off rather well (I'll leave musical judgments up to the listener).
On the other hand, the re-issue of "I Coulda' Told Ya'" (in progress)
used far too much, and I've backed it off quite a bit.

As an aside, "Toldya" has been a complete re-edit.  I'm working on an
article discussing the work I've been involved in regarding the M-roll
reconstruction project, and this "Toldya" re-edit.  I've learned an
enormous amount of info studying these M-rolls and other 88 note rolls
using Wayne Stahnke's VIEW program.  Old time coding techniques could be
a course in itself.

George Bogatko