Real time roll reading has been an interest of mine for awhile. Being 
able to read a roll directly and have it play back my Pianomation
system would be an interesting thing to watch and experience.

Several years ago I ran across someone on YouTube who developed
a software for visually reading rolls. At the time of this software
creation they were using a rather low resolution web cam to line up
with the roll and a grid on the software that represented the holes
in a tracker bar where it read the holes in real time and sent out
a MIDI signal from the software.

It also supported various types of rolls including Ampico and Duo-Art
as well as the old 88 note non expression rolls. So the software had
the ability to interpret the expression from these reproducer rolls
play that back as a real time MIDI stream.

This early development of the software had tracking issues so was
a bit tricky to work with. Also the software was expecting a black or
very dark surface under the roll to read the holes. Since that time
the software was developed to read the holes from a lighted background
and the tracking had been improved but resolution was still low.

The most recent version of the software has much better resolution, but
they have gone in another direction with the software and are now using
it to read roll images from archives of scanned rolls and the software
no longer supports a camera for reading rolls from an actual roll
passing under a camera. I think this concept is quite good as it allows
for flexible design of all sorts of tracker bars for the many different
roll types out there.

My first attempt to use the software, I took an old roll box from
a player with attached gears with chains and laid it on it's back and
mounted an HD webcam on a frame above the roll. I ran it with a geared
motor with a speed control. I was partially successful, but I always
thought it would be best to have a higher resolution webcam support.

Here are a couple links to videos of this software in action. Note that
the image on the right in this first video is the roll reader software
and the left window is a piano VST software. This first one is the
direct roll reading from the earlier Roll Reader software version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdlYqYE5nTE 

A newer video showing the software reading a roll scanned image:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uHzt7Dx1WQ 

I have since asked kyokutyou2007 if he planned to add the camera support
back to the software in the future, but it was not in the plan and the
reason was because of tracking issues.

I am not a programmer so I don't know if this tracking issue can be
overcome or not -- it could be very difficult to do -- but even so, the
software does an amazing job at playing these scanned roll images and
there is quite a large library of these scanned images of rolls being
scanned by Stanford University with a high quality scanning process.

Hope you enjoy these videos of this software. The software is available
for download on the YouTube page if you would enjoy trying it out.

Jeff Stauffer

 [ Katz Sasaki (Katsumasa Sasaki) developed the "PlaySK Piano Roll
 [ Reader", see https://www.mmdigest.com/Archives/KWIC/P/playsk.html 
 [ https://www.youtube.com/@kyokutyou2007 
 [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14wuWYVXMCo&list=UULFYAfxBWwKy7VoZBNH_NT08A 
 [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2dUdIUTXZ4 
 [ -- Robbie