I don't know if this thought on the subject has come up; if it did
I missed it.  The thing that I lay awake worrying about is the future
of all those millions(?) of old paper rolls slowly moldering away.

I have about 700 or so rolls including about 400 Duo-Arts, many of them
over 80 years old.  Some of the older ones are at a stage where even
pulling out the leader causes them to tear and any slight malfunction
of the piano or the shock of rewind could be instant death to the roll.
I know that there is an effort to electronically preserve at least the
Duo-Art rolls, but I think that player pianos are best played with
paper rolls.

Does anyone have any thoughts on what the life expectancy of these
old rolls might be?  Has anyone come up with some magic process to
rejuvenate or at least stabilize this old paper?

Perhaps the future of mechanical music is in new rolls of the kind of
music that is popular with the younger generation.  I don't know enough
about it to know whether it could be successfully played on a piano,
but most of those 80-year-old piano rolls were the popular music in
their day, and probably more the reason for the success of player
pianos than classical music.  Could a piano compete with an amplified
guitar played in such a way that the inventor of the instrument would
not know it was a guitar?

I suspect that the future of mechanical music will remain with that
relatively small segment of the population that like old cars, old
furniture, old houses, old movies and other antiques and I suspect that
percentage will remain relatively constant.

Dave Geissinger

 [ Mike Montgomery loaned me a rare Capitol roll of 1926 which was so
 [ brittle he didn't dare play it.  I played about two-thirds of the
 [ roll before problems developed.  I tried to repair a portion but
 [ the paper _shattered_ when I applied splicing tape.  I was amazed!
 [ With great care I made photocopies of the fragments of the last
 [ portion so that someday the music can be reconstructed.  Then I sent
 [ the roll (what was left of it) to Janet Tonnesen for transcription
 [ to computer file.  I can't imagine that any chemical treatment could
 [ save the paper at this late stage of decomposition, but at least
 [ the music will be accurately preserved and can be perforated on new
 [ paper.  -- Robbie