Amid all the talk about preserving old piano rolls, etc., this may
be of interest to the readers of MMDigest.  There is a company,
www.zenph.com, that has invented a way to take old solo piano sound
recordings and translate them into a high quality MIDI file, playable
on a solenoid piano, such a the Disklavier Pro, which then allows us
to hear this old recording on a modern grand piano.

It's amazing when you hear the before and after file of the Cortot
recording they have put up on their web site as a sample of their work.
I have written to them, asking if they are ever going to release these
high quality MIDI files so that we may play them on our solenoid
equipped pianos.  They wrote back and, unfortunately, one of the main
obstacles to doing just that are the copyrights.  I hope in the future,
Zenph will be able to work around or with the copyright owners of these
piano recordings, so that we may hear this incredible collection of
past recordings on our own pianos.

I believe Zenph has a recording contract with Sony BMG, to release over
time 18 CD's, the first being the Glenn Gould Goldberg Variations from
the 1950s!

As far as preserving old piano rolls by scanning, etc., I applaud the
owners of the copyrights to these rolls, such as Ampico and Duo-Art,
for not pursing lawsuits and like.  As it stands now, this freedom has
allowed many different people to build scanners and produce many great
MIDI scans of piano rolls that we would probably have never been able
to own, and it has preserved them as well.  If it had not been for the
generous owners of these copyrights, I think a lot of these scarce and
rare rolls would have never been scanned and they would have been lost
to the ravages of time, etc.  People such as Richard Stibbons, Spencer
Chase, Peter Phillips, and many more that I am not aware of, should be
praised for their work.

John Del Carlo