Beware of thousands of Ampico MIDI files that were read into a roll
scanner using a capstan drive but were never tempo-corrected. Many
original rolls were compensated so the tempo would remain the same as
the paper built up on the take-up spool.
When pulled through a scanner with a capstan, the resulting file gets
slower and slower from beginning to end. Although many people don't
seem to mind, I have to reset the tempo at least once during playback,
about two thirds of the way through each file, because they slow down
so much.
One vendor told me it's a simple matter to use his tempo compensation
program on each file, but when installing a MIDI playback system in
a customer's Ampico, I didn't have the time to do this to thousands
of files. Perhaps someone has taken care of this since I first
encountered the problem.
Art Reblitz
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