Hello All,

With the passing of Warren Trachtman, our mechanical music hobby has
lost one of its most important and indispensable persons.  And as
already noted on these pages, one of the most kind and selfless people
you will ever meet in this life.

It is difficult to understate the importance of what Warren did for
those of us who care about preserving rolls, and also about wishing
to perforate high-quality (or perfect) copies of original music rolls.
To a large extent, these things were made possible thanks to Warren's
willingness to work, and solve, a number of vexing problems.*

Beginning around 2001, the hobby began to finally recognize the
importance of obtaining high quality optical scans of music rolls
as they began to deteriorate, both to preserve them for future
generations, but also to enable roll manufacturers to punch better
quality copies.  This was after years of urging by folks "in the
know" (most notably -- and almost exclusively -- Wayne Stahnke) who
had argued that higher quality scans, and a higher quality output,
was possible and desirable.  Warren thereafter developed an entire
software suite which he made available free to anyone (worldwide),
such that rolls could be scanned by people all over the world and then
uploaded to a site he had built for the preservation of music rolls via
such scans.  I have been able to punch rolls from people located as
far afield as New Zealand, Great Britain and Germany using Warren's
software.  The only thing Warren asked (and most people complied) was
that people adhere to certain standards so that the resulting scans
could be made use of by everyone.  Thus Warren's work addressed a
longtime problem in the hobby -- the lack of a scanning standard.

So beginning in about 2003, folks with variable-step perforators were
able to make perfect copies of music rolls using Warren's free --
and frequently upgraded -- software.  And he created templates for
all of:  88 note, Welte-Mignon Licensee, Welte-Mignon T-100, Duo-Art
US, Duo-Art UE, Ampico A and B, A roll, G roll, Wurlitzer 150, 58 note,
65 note, and others.  It was not just one software client either, it
consisted of a suite of several different, high-specialized components.

The following roll companies (at least) have utilized the products
of Warren's software in punching rolls:  Precision Music Rolls (Dave
Saul); Keystone Music Rolls (Richard Groman/Larry Doe), Custom-Gaida
Music Rolls (R. Tonnesen, Ed Gaida), Sierra-Meliora Music Rolls (Bob
Billings, T. Baxter), and Julian Dyer.

Further, the fact that Warren created such a large repository for roll
scans means that people are able to have precious lost rolls recreated.
This is the most gratifying thing I do as a "roll manufacturer" --
to enable someone to have again a special music roll that had been
destroyed.

And . . . Warren did all this without even owning a player piano!

Other people can better opine on Warren's other significant
accomplishments, which include being a devoted ragtime enthusiast and
an accomplished pianist who posted many excellent performances on his
website for anyone to enjoy.

As a tribute, please consider taking a moment to listen to Warren's
really outstanding version of "Maple Leaf Rag" as played by him,
live.  I am very fond of his interpretation; it is nicely "bouncy"
and conveys the inherent excitement of the piece, and (for me) has just
the right amount of ornamentation - it keeps things interesting while
not distracting from the underlying excellence of the score.

http://www.trachtman.org/ragtime/liveplay.htm 

Respectfully,

Timothy A. Baxter
Atlanta, Georgia
Meliora Music Rolls

* It is critically for me to note that many of us were able to punch
perfect copies for several years prior to Warren's work by using
scans graciously provided by Wayne Stahnke, and that my praise of
Warren in no way detracts from Wayne's foresight in pushing -- for
nearly 20 years prior to 2001 -- for people to strive for 100%
accurate punch matrix recovery (i.e., a punch-for-punch duplicate
of the original).  Yet I do not believe it detracts from Wayne's
contributions to say that Warren's work motivated people, worldwide,
to build their own scanners, and thus allowed a dramatic uptick in the
preservation of rolls via scans.  And I know of no one, in 2017, who
is punching rolls in the US or the UK, that is not utilizing extremely
high quality scans as the basis for their new music rolls.