Talk:Player piano

Early Cost

While I'm totally ignorant about player pianos (hence reading the article), I do know there's something wrong with this sentence:

"It cost $250 (£65) - a large sum of money at the time." $250 is far more money than £65. The exchange rate is about 2:1 at the moment, and I'm not aware of any time the discrepancy has been as great as suggested here. The thing is, I can't rightly change it since I don't know which price is correct! (or when "the time" is for that matter) 86.131.147.6 (talk) 18:50, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

duh - $250 is what it cost in 1896 in the USA as per their advert, £65 was the stated price on British adverts of the period. What has the 2:1 exchange rate of today got to do with that? At that time the rate was closer to 4:1 and was so until after WW11 Undergroundpianola (talk) 12:05, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

Pianola pages

I'm new to Wikipedia, and I probably don't have too much time to browse or edit on a regular basis. I hope I haven't breached any gentlemen's (or gentlewomen's) agreements by jumping in with both feet.

There are many, many things in life about which I know nothing, but I am effectively one of the world experts on pianolas. So in due course I'll hope to create some other pages around the subject.

If I don't regularly check in to messages at Wikipedia, I can always be contacted at rex@pianola.org. And www.pianola.org is a good starting place for trawling the Net on the subject of player pianos and music rolls.

Regards to all,

Rex Lawson

Hi Rex, and welcome to Wikipedia. I would recommend you create an account because it makes communication easier. Also, you will be able to sign messages with ~~~ or ~~~~. Dori | Talk 15:54, Dec 18, 2003 (UTC)

Thank you for the welcome, Dori. I have an account, appropriately called Pianola.

Great information - but I think the 'music roll' information should be moved to the Piano Roll page. What do others think?

Player vs. Reproducing

I'm no expert on these pianos, but from what I understand there is a difference between PLAYER piano and REPRODUCING piano. Does anyone know enough about the two types to perhaps edit the article to reflect that? --Wolf530 04:56, Mar 22, 2004 (UTC)

There is indeed a difference between the player piano and the reproducing piano. The player piano uses a roll with programmed nitches that correspond to notes on a piece. A reproducing piano on the other hand is programmed via a live performance. The method used today is by digital means, although, reproducing pianos were common by the dawn of the twentieth century. The old method of recording the live performances is not to my knowledge and was in fact what I was looking for on this edit page. 12:30, Aug 27, 2006.

I agree. In the U.S. at least, the words "player piano" conjure up tinny heaps of junk in cowboy movies, or still seen today in novelty general stores. By contrast, I just heard on the radio this morning a piece by Felix Mendelsohn recorded using the "Aolian company Duo-Art process" for the "reproducing piano", which was fantastically precise and nuanced and marvelous sounding! I suspect that many/most readers of this article will be equally ignorant, equating player pianos with the movie stereotype; this stereotype should be mentioned and then demolished. linas 14:23, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Just because in the US the words "player piano" may conjure up odd images for a very very few feeble-minded people cannot require the effort of a stereotype to be demolished. People who are that dumb won't read it, grasp the point or ever be disabused of their quaint notions in any event. Sadly, the worst offenders are often the enthusiasts who, holding these stereotypes themselves, go about trying to de-tune, rinkytinkify and electrically pump what were once finely musical manually operated instruments intended for human interaction. Undergroundpianola (talk) 12:44, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

Pneumatic player piano close up

closeup

Should a close up of a pneumatic player piano be added? There could start to be too many images on the page.

Pic is here: http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Image:Pianola_closeup.JPG MxAesir 06:08, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

Nickelodeon

Arent' these also called Nickelodeons?

A Nickelodeon is a nickname for a coin operated player piano in a public place. It also was a term for a small movie theater (The word means "Nickle Theater")--Saxophobia 18:12, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

Yamaha Disklavier

I'm at a loss. The entire section on The Yamaha Disklavier reads like an advertisement, but at the same time I don't feel it appropriate to remove the section in its entirety. If anyone thinks they can salvage it, please try. Mlzg4

If you thought that was an ad, read one of MichaelIsGreat's edits. He struck 8 times on this article and 8 times on the Bösendorfer article before he was blocked. Each time after one of his edits was reverted, he would come back, making the obvious ad even more obvious, and using insulting edit descriptions (The mad people who delete my postings, GO BACK TO YOUR MAD HOUSE!!!). If you want to see what he did, look through the edit history, and click the date and time link next to MichaelIsGreat's username. SupaStarGirl 17:36, 25 June 2006 (UTC)

The Disklavier does now have its own page. To be fair the Disklavier is entriely significant in its own right now. It has been in production longer than most pneumatic reproducing pianos ever were and almost certainly has shipped far more instruments of this type than any pneumatic reproducing piano builder ever did. Fans of old pneumatic reproducing pianos get very sniffy about solenoid operated instruments. This is misguided as, of course, some of the very earliest player pianos were also solenoid operated and featured rudimentary automatic dynamic control making them, like the Disklavier, reproducing pianos of a sort. Undergroundpianola (talk) 12:13, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

John McTammany

I've just edited the paragraph on McTammany, saying that he claimed much credit towards the invention of the player piano, rather than that he deserved it. In both his books, McTammany is not above ignoring the achievements of others, and I think posterity has so far swallowed his own opinion of himself a little too uncritically.

There were many other important inventors in the field of roll-operated musical instruments, and in my view it is not right to single out McTammany. However, his paragraph stands until someone gets time to write up the achievements of all the others.

Pianola 21:15, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

No, posterity hasn't swallowed his own opinion of himself a little too uncritically. It's only much later on that we have come to look back at McTammany - and critically so. McTammany is vindicated by now freely-available online patents and the ability in the internet age to access far more material that was available to the early generations of player piano enthusiasts. McTammany was very careful in what does claim for himself if you read his work carefully. Often he is mis-read and people assume he was claiming for himself more than he was. The entire text of his book is avaiable online via the Player Piano Group's website Undergroundpianola (talk) 12:36, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

Removing the development history

While reading through the history submitted by User:84.13.3.210 I noticed this:

From the early days, manufacturers sought to create mechanisms which would pick out the melody of a musical composition over the background of the rest of the music in the same manner as a live pianist. Click here to see a few of them. (emphasis added)

It's a shame to have to remove so much info from the article, but there can be little doubt that it contains material copied and pasted from off-site, without any mention of permission. If you're the person who made those edits, please comment on this page as to where the material came from. Gazpacho 06:24, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

It's back. I added some fact tags and directed the contributor to WP:CITE in the edit comment. (SEWilco 04:23, 1 September 2007 (UTC))

The bulk of that section is from the Player Piano Group website and the content (written by woprld player expert Julian Dyer) and its dissemination into Wikipedia is authorised Undergroundpianola (talk) 12:16, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

(Commenting on the paragraph above by Undergroundpianola)... Specifically, the relevant source page is https://www.playerpianogroup.org.uk/articles/the-history-of-player-piano/26 but there the author is just listed as "The Player Piano Group" (no mention of Julian Dyer) and I see nothing on that website to suggest that the copyright-owner has given relevant permission. Even if permission were not a concern, that material lacks citations, it is in a conversational rather than encyclopaedic style, and it contains speculation and opinion, so ideally it could do with some changes.

Flight trainer

The references for this material are all in the linked articles. --Zeamays (talk) 13:01, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

Edwin Votey

..., inventor of the famous Pianola, yet to write for a hero of the wikipedia and knowers of the reed organ and the piano.. .. Most needed hints here: http://www.pianola.org/factsheets/votey.cfm -- AxelKing (talk) 21:48, 27 October 2011 (UTC)

Votey is often over-stated as it was he who cobbled together the push-up piano player that helped the Aeolian Company continue on its path to becoming the main mechanical music factor in the USA. Aeolian's market dominance was created not by the success of the pianola but by very substantial outside investor captial input enabling extensive advertising and product marketing without which it would have been no better off than any other company. After the main source of this income was withdrawn in 1924 the company rapidly shrank and Aeolian Hall in New York was sold straight away. Without the outside capital input to boost Aeolian overall Votey could never have been any more notable than any other inventor who cobbled together a pneumatic piano player during the years 1891 -1900. Aeolian's main income was always from its expensive player pipe organs aimed at the uber-wealthy yet the number of surviving pianola player pianos and their fans in the English-speaking world who hold a light up to Votey from this end of history is so overwhelming that it makes things look other than they were. Votey is significant but there are others who, all things considered, are equally or more worthy also. Undergroundpianola (talk) 12:27, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

To me, your complaint about Votey's significance appears to be a minor viewpoint. Whether Aeolian was successful because of capital and marketing or because of quality product does not change the fact that they were successful. Votey rightly deserves credit for achieving what he did. Binksternet (talk) 14:38, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

Unsourced Material

Article has been tagged for needing references since 2009. Please feel free to reincorporate the below material with appropriate citations. Doniago (talk) 14:27, 19 March 2012 (UTC)

Player mechanism

== Player mechanism == A coin-operated Link piano Orchestrion Horizontal row of tracker tubes detects music roll holes The player mechanism is essentially a bank of switches activated by software. The switches are pneumatically operating valves which switch on the motive force used to play the piano action. This motive force is created by switching suction into a miniature collapsible pneumatic bellows with one assembly assigned to each individual note. The valve switching system is triggered by the music roll. As the paper perforations run over the music reading bar (known as the "tracker bar") air is allowed to enter. This causes a pressure differential within the mechanism triggering the switching valves to operate. The note channels can be either on or off and hence the music roll can be regarded as an early form of programmable binary software. The apparatus operates from suction generated by two small foot-treadled bellows coupled to a large spring-operated bellows that stores the vacuum and balances the air flow. Electric player pianos use a simple rotary vacuum pump similar to the kind in a household vacuum cleaner, though the airflow may be muffled and the pump isolated from vibration, so that the noise from the electric air pump doesn't drown out the music being played. To keep the perforations properly centered over the holes on the reproducer, there are two small vacuum holes that are partially covered by the edges of the paper roll, with the holes linked to a pair of opposing bellows in a push-pull arrangement. If the roll is shifted too far to the left or right, one of the holes is fully covered, causing one bellows to collapse while the other expands; this motion operates a cam pushing on one end of the supply roll support rod. Some pianos allow for note shifting, which is playing a roll at a higher or lower key. The reproducer slides on a track, with an adjustment knob that is rotated to move the reproducer left or right. A position indicator shows when the holes are properly aligned for the next higher or lower pitch position. Notes are sustained and the piano keys held down by using a long continuous slot in the paper. However, long slots structurally weaken the paper and can cause tearing or shifting of the thin paper bands between sustained notes. To help prevent tearing, sustained notes often use a series of perforations following a short initial key activation slot. The perforations strengthen the paper but cause a variation in airflow which may lead to a slight bouncing of the keys, but the only requirement is that the key be held firmly enough to sustain the played note. Player pianos are all fitted with hand levers for the performer to vary volume and speed to imitate a live performer. As such they may be regarded as the first truly interactive acoustic music making machine; something without any parallel until only the past half-decade with the advances in modern computing technology and software. The doors over the roll and reproducer serve an important function, to keep dust out of the interior and prevent fouling of the reproducer holes.

What is the reasoning for your drive by destruction of the article? Looking it over, much of it is not cited. Why aren't you wholesale deleting almost all of it?

The content is undisputed, easily verifiable by yourself, and not contentious. DMahalko (talk) 02:47, 20 March 2012 (UTC)

The material was disputed when the article was tagged over two years ago, if the material is easily verifiable, then verify it, and it clearly is contentious if we're having this discussion. You may wish to review WP:V. If you feel there is additional unsourced material that should be removed until sourcing is provided, you are welcome to remove it; I am under no such obligation. Doniago (talk) 15:21, 20 March 2012 (UTC)

Nothing was disputed by the tagger. Here, I looked it up. It was just a general drive-by tagging, by someone not disputing anything.

http://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?title=Player_piano&diff=273019365&oldid=272287866

You are the one turning this general handwaved "something should be done here" molehole into a mountain.

From what you deleted it's clear to me that you don't understand the article topic at all and are just deleting this one section only because I edited it, and for the smugness of "DMahalko, I'm right, and you're wrong wrong wrong! You didn't cite, youuuu diiiidnn't ciiiiiteee! Nyah Nyah Nyah!" *Delete without even any comprehension of the article content deleted*

Since you love quoting rules at me, here's one for you. Wikipedia:NODEADLINE Citations and photo examples will be arriving when I have had time to do more research. Until then, the article content is not controversial or being disputed as wrong or incorrect by anyone -- including you -- and so can remain in the article as it is, until such citations can be provided.

Looking at your reversions in this article, I see you've been busily doing this for a while, doing wholesale reverting of Wikipedia:Good_faith edits and improvements from other editors. DMahalko (talk) 08:29, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

When you'd like to discuss this in a civil manner and focus on the issues with the text itself rather than your issues with my editing style, which I'd note has generally been supported as a valid interpretation of policy, I will be happy to respond. Until then, if you reinsert the material without proper sourcing you will be in violation of WP:BURDEN and I will treat it accordingly. If you truly feel my moving the material here is without merit, I invite you to take it to WP:3O to get a third opinion from a neutral party. Or if you feel I am the problem, by all means bring it up at WP:ANI or wherever you feel it would be most appropriate; this Talk space is not the proper forum for discussing such concerns. Cheers. Doniago (talk) 13:07, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

You are the problem, and your editing style is overly aggressive and not following policy. WP:V says, right at the top:

It must be possible to attribute all information in Wikipedia to reliable, published sources that are appropriate for the content in question. However, in practice it is only necessary to provide inline citations for quotations and for any information that has been challenged or that is likely to be challenged.

Which is what I'm saying. It doesn't matter if someone stuck a tag in a section saying "not cited since 1823" because Wikipedia policy doesn't require or DEMAND it. You are the one demanding it.

Reverting/deleting whole sections of edits not because they are inaccurate or wrong, but only because it lacked citations, is not a good enough reason to remove it. You are not challenging any of the text you removed. DMahalko (talk) 15:31, 24 March 2012 (UTC)

Based on the results of your WP:ANI filing to this point, the consensus appears to be that I have acted in compliance with policy. If you would like to reincorporate the text that I removed, please feel free to do so, citing appropriate sources per WP:BURDEN. I am actively following the conversation there and shall certainly reconsider this matter if and when consensus at WP:ANI appears to change. Cheers. Doniago (talk) 13:43, 26 March 2012 (UTC)

Development

=== 1876–1890 === Following the Philadelphia exhibition, the mechanical music business began to grow rapidly. Various companies were founded in the later 1870s to manufacture and sell automated reed organs. Most significant to the development of the player piano was the Aeolian Company, founded as the Mechanical Orguinette Company in 1878, initially as retailer of small reed organs made by the Munroe Organ Company and others. These instruments started out with valveless actions, the air flowing through the paper operating the reed directly. Throughout this period, the instruments grew larger and more complex, and valves were added to switch the air flow, so ensuring faster response and requiring smaller holes in the paper. The idea of incorporating the new player devices into pianos developed over this period. Needham filed a patent in 1880 describing a pneumatic player device in a piano. The main technical development of this period was the double valve system, which enabled machines to switch the volume of air needed to operate piano actions. The valves effectively worked as amplifiers, a small air flow being used to switch a much larger volume of air. Inventors persisted with the early cumbersome mechanical linkage systems for a long time, although the valve system was considerably simpler. The main reason for this appears to be that no suitable airtight thin leather was available to make the small pouches which inflate to operate the valves. By the late 1880s, the development of suitable pneumatic materials and leathers had advanced sufficiently that effective and reliable player mechanisms were starting to enter the marketplace. 1890–1900 In 1896, Theodore P Brown introduced and marketed the "Aeriol Piano", which was the first substantially complete player piano. That same year, Wilcox and White introduced their "Angelus" cabinet player, which was a modification of their earlier grand and upright player pianos. None of the early player pianos was a success, though John McTammany (self-proclaimed "inventor of the player") credited Brown as the first to organize, in a practical manner, the ideas others had developed over the previous 20 years. Through the middle 1890s, Edwin S Votey developed his piano playing device, the Pianola. This was offered to the Aeolian Company to sell alongside their range of reed organs. It was launched in 1897, and very aggressively marketed over the following years. It was the advertising organized by Harry Tremaine and the Wilcox and White Company that established the market for piano playing devices. In these early years, the main demand was for cabinet players (devices rolled to the keyboard of an existing piano, to press the keys with mechanical wooden "fingers"), and it was some years before the public preferred to buy an entirely new self-contained instrument and trade in their old perfectly good regular pianos. As market demand changed, the "internal player" came back into view and was developed again, this time in earnest.

1920-1930

=== 1920–1930 === 1920–30 was the decade that saw the player piano reach its peak, and then its rapid decline. The peak sales of instruments and rolls were in the first few years of the decade. At one point, more than half of all pianos being made in America contained a player unit. The player piano was not an obscure by-line – it was the dominant force in the industry. In the early 1920s, many pianists of note, in classical and popular fields, were called on to make rolls. Little new technically arose through the 1920s. Perhaps the most significant was the launch of a significantly improved form of the Ampico system, the Ampico B, in 1926. This was accompanied by an automatic recording device that could record a pianist's note timings and dynamics. The technical advances of the 1920s were instead largely in radio technology. The key development there was the introduction of amplification, so that it was possible to sit around the radio and listen as a family, unlike the earlier crystal sets which required the use of headphones. Amplification was also applied to the recording of 78 rpm records, the electrical recording systems introduced around 1925 allowing a major rise in sound quality. Radio and these new records rapidly eroded the market for the player piano, and it was declining from the mid-1920s onwards. Novel attempts to combine the appeal of the player piano and its new rivals were made by building radios and/or phonographs into player pianos themselves, but even this could not entice the public to continue buying player pianos. When the Wall Street crash came in October 1929, the player piano was already in a very weak position, and sales effectively ceased. Only a few well-capitalized companies continued in business after this. Many of these companies were the result of consolidation throughout the 1920s, which had already seen the loss of most names, particularly in the roll-making field. During this period player piano pneumatic technology was used as the basis for the aircraft training simulators by inventor Edwin Albert Link. This device, powered by suction and bellows, moved realistically in response to a pilot's operation of the controls. Link developed the flight simulator in his father's Binghamton, New York factory, which made coin-operated pianos for commercial establishments and movie theater pipe organs. The Link Company commercialized the device in 1929. A British equivalent was the Silloth trainer, based on Duo-Art technology. Electronic descendants of these devices are now widespread.

1930-1950

=== 1930–1950 === A few companies struggled on through the 1930s. In 1931 Aeolian purchased the American Piano Company, makers of the Ampico. To bring capital to the business, they sold off all their overseas assets, so the large piano factory at Hayes was closed and sold with one month's notice, to the Gramophone Company, also based in the town. The joint Aeolian-American operation stopped making new classical rolls and concentrated on popular material, and the final new rolls were issued in the late 1930s. A major survivor throughout this was the QRS piano roll company, originally an offshoot of Melville Clarke's operation. Owned by the mid-1920s by Max Kortlander, and funded by his income as a composer, QRS continued to issue rolls, all of them created by J. Lawrence Cook, chief roll arranger from 1921 to 1961 (he supplemented his income as a postal worker). Thanks to QRS, roll repertoire is available from the 1930s and 1940s. Other than QRS, the end of the 1930s had seen the end of the player piano era. The lingering roll production in England finally ceased in 1941 when paper rationing made it impossible to continue. The Aeolian Duo-Art recording machinery was destroyed by bombing during World War II, as was the Welte factory in Freiburg. However, the immediate aftermath of the war saw the growth of interest in this lost era. Richard Simonton purchased the surviving Welte-Mignon rolls from Edwin Welte, and the first disc recordings were made of the performances. The enthusiast era had, tentatively, begun.

Predecessors

The idea of automatic musical devices can be traced back many centuries, and the use of pinned barrels to operate percussion mechanisms (such as striking bells in a clock) was perfected long before the invention of the piano. These devices were later extended to operate musical boxes, which contain a set of tuned metal teeth plucked by the player mechanism. An early musical instrument to be automated was the organ, which is comparatively easy to operate automatically. The power for the notes is provided by air from a bellows system, and the organist or player device only has to operate a valve to control the available air. The playing task is ideally performed by a pinned barrel, and the art of barrel organs was well advanced by the mid-18th century. The piano is a complex instrument, requiring each note to be struck with a different force to control the dynamics of the performance. The entire force required to sound the note must be given by the performer hitting the keys. It proved to be difficult for a player device to combine a variable percussive force and a controlled note duration. Barrels do not provide a percussive force, but a relatively gentle switching motion. Early barrel pianos moved the hammer back and forwards continuously as the operator turned the handle, but the hammers did not strike the strings until moved slightly forwards by a pin in the barrel. The hammers hit repeatedly until the pin was removed. This played the note, but at a fixed dynamic and with a tremolo action quite unlike a pianist. The development of the player piano was the gradual overcoming of the various difficulties of controlled percussive striking and note duration. The earliest practical piano playing device was probably the Forneaux Pianista, which used compressed air to inflate a bellows when the barrel pin opened a valve. This bellows struck the piano key and so played the note. The acceleration of developments leading to the pneumatic 'player' device started in the 1840s and began to reach some recognizable device in the 1870s. The start of the player period can probably be seen as the Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia, USA. At this exhibition were a number of automatic player devices, including the Pianista, that contained the elements which would lead to the player. The earliest description of a piano playing device using perforated paper rolls was Claude Seytre's French patent of 1842. The concept was sound, but the device described was impractical in the way it read the roll and operated the piano. In 1847, Alexander Bain described a device that used a paper roll as a 'travelling valve' that allowed air to flow through the reeds of a reed organ. Simple reed and pipe organs using this sort of system are still being produced. However, the air flow is not sufficient to drive a piano mechanism. In 1848 Charles Dawson of England described a more complex travelling valve device which added little to Bain's. Hunt & Bradish of the US, 1849, used a roll read by sprung fingers, the springs being strong enough to operate the piano mechanism directly. This device applied the entire playing strength to the paper, so would have shredded it rapidly, and the device would have had to be as wide as the piano keyboard. In 1851, Pape, England, submitted a patent that recognized the need to remove the playing force from the paper, using light springs to read the roll and activate a more robust device which plays the note—a mechanical amplifier. The first device to address the practical requirement of operating a piano mechanism was Forneaux's, of 1863. This recognized that a hard strike was needed to throw the hammer towards the keys. It used a traditional barrel, but tripped a pneumatic device that inflated bellows rapidly to operate the note. In 1871 a perforated cardboard book was substituted for the barrel, but it was still read using sprung fingers. This device entered manufacture, and is generally regarded as the first practical player device. It was exhibited in Philadelphia in 1876. Van Dusen's American patent of 1867 was the first to describe a pneumatic striker operated by a roll. It was probably based on the work of John McTammany. A leap in thought occurred in the 1873 patent of the Schmoele brothers. They described a 'double valve' system that acted as a pneumatic amplifier, reading the roll electrically and operating the pneumatics with an electromagnet. They also exhibited at Philadelphia. With some modification, and pneumatic reading of the roll, this would become the final player piano some 20 years later, although the Schmoele brothers never benefited from it. In 1876, John McTammany exhibited a working player in Philadelphia that used a paper roll read using sprung fingers whose slight movement triggered a mechanical player device. This operated a reed organ. McTammany had been experimenting since the mid-1860s, and went on to be one of the key names in the early player industry. He claimed to be the inventor of the 'player', but not the 'player piano'—an important distinction.

Preservation and restoration

=== Preservation and restoration === Roll scanning has made significant advances in recent years, applying technology to possibly the most obvious yet hardest of all conservation and preservation topics, the replication of aging and disintegrating piano rolls. Roll scanning is the process of reading a music roll into a computerized form that can be used for any purpose, such as cutting new rolls or operating old or new instruments directly. This uses the same technology as domestic flatbed scanners, hence the term roll scanner. The ubiquity of computers makes scanning fundamental to the preservation of rolls of all types, as well as providing the basis for secondary activities such as operating instruments directly. Roll master re-creation is the process of understanding how the roll was originally manufactured so that errors arising from the scanning are removed, and the computer works to the same accuracy as the original perforators in the roll factory. This allows exact replica rolls to be made, and maximizes the accuracy of any secondary activity. Replication of the original master from which a perforated paper roll was created is the highest aim of roll scanning. Roll masters are not literally replicated, because they were originally large cardboard rolls, but re-created in a computerized form. The rationale is that starting with the master in this form, anything can be done with the music – cut new rolls, operate player pianos fitted with electronic valves, or simulate a performance for playing on modern instruments – all without introducing any errors. This is the case because virtually all rolls were punched in fixed rows, where punches will occur only in one row or the next, but never in between: the roll is effectively a digital storage medium. Scanning simply counts the distance from the start of the roll to each note event, giving an analogue, and hence inaccurate, representation of the roll. If instead the rows are counted, the result is an exact representation of the original roll – a perfect digital copy. This can be done by applying knowledge about the original roll's creation to the scan. Once the master computerized copy has been recreated, all of the information in the roll is retained, and anything done after this can be done with the accuracy of the original roll. When using the analogue version, all its timing errors are carried through to whatever is done with it. This is particularly true when making recut rolls, where imposing the punch-row spacing of the perforator over the (different) row spacing of the original roll causes surprisingly obvious and audible errors. However, even analogue uses of the scan, such as operating instruments directly, benefits from the recreated master because of the way it removes timing errors from the basic scan, and in so doing allows the accuracy of the scanner itself to be calibrated. Roll scanning itself is not of major significance – it simply adds optical technology to the pneumatic, electrical and mechanical technologies previously used to extract data from perforated paper. The ability to store the extracted data on electronic media marked the start of the modern era of scanning, but did little more than act as a substitute for the paper roll. The most familiar such system is the Marantz Pianocorder, but at least two systems were produced in the 1970s, by Wayne Stahnke and Australian engineer Peter Phillips, to operate Ampico reproducing pianos from pre-recorded cassettes. Phillips further developed his system in the 1980s to play an Ampico from an Apple II computer with the piano roll data stored on floppy disks. From having the performance in "streaming" form on a tape to extracting the note events into a list in a computer is a fairly small step. Such computerisation of the scanned data adds the ability to edit and manipulate it. The key advance is the manipulation that converts the analogue scan data to a replica of the perforation master. The first serious and sustained roll master replication exercise was probably that of Wayne Stahnke, who described his by-then completed methods in the Mechanical Music Digest in March 1996, and used them to practical advantage in his Rachmaninoff-Bösendorfer CDs. He started with a pneumatic roll reader (from the mid-1970s, for the IMI Cassette Converter system and later projects) and later moved to an optical system. He has been offering commercial scanning and roll master re-creation since the mid-1990s. Within UK Player Piano Group circles, the topic of recreating roll masters was already well established by 1996. Rex Lawson had raised the topic as part of his work developing a perforation-level roll editor software suite for his Perforetur rolls, and the topic was publicly discussed in the PPG bulletin during winter 1994/5 when Lawson explained precisely why rolls should be copied punch-for-punch, digitally. Richard Stibbons started his roll-scanning attempts in the mid-1990s, and described his progress in PPG article “The PC Pianola” in December 1995. Soon afterwards he adopted the master replication idea, described very thoroughly in September 2000. This led directly to the launch of the Rollscanners group in February 2001. The aim of this group has been to focus and publicise scanning efforts worldwide, encouraging sharing of progress and knowledge, a radical shift from the earlier essentially private attempts.

Dual usage

I don't think it is clearly stated in the article whether a pianola can usually (or always?) be played as an ordinary piano as well as a player-piano. I was curious because the singer Imogen Heap, who is a good pianist, has a Steinway Duo Art pianola which she frequently uses as a regular piano (see various videos on YouTube, e.g. here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVPtJ13f4Wk ). Is this a standard feature of pianolas? The article does say that ordinary pianos were at one period often converted into pianolas, and it would be odd to do so if this prevented them being used as pianos. Maybe the answer is glaringly obvious to pianola experts, but Wikipedia articles are aimed primarily at people who are not experts in the subject concerned!109.157.151.84 (talk) 19:35, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Most pianolas can be played as ordinary pianos, the chief exception being instruments built in cabinet form without keyboards. modifications to the piano action, generally lengthening the keys to make room for the pneumatic mechanism, may change the touch and responsiveness of the action and make it less satisfactory to play by hand.Saxophobia (talk) 19:23, 22 June 2013 (UTC)

List of Player Piano Manufacturers

• Disklavier - Yamaha
• Pianocorder - Pianocrder
• PianoDisc - PianoDisc
• PNOmation (formerly Pianomation) - QRS

Unsourced sections

I did a little research and found a few likely sources for some sections of the article that are heavily lacking in sources. The 'Antecedents' and 'Development' sections seem to have been copied from this article: The History of Player Piano The 'Preservation and restoration' section seems to have been copied from this article: The AMICA Bulletin - Stacks are the Stanford

I hope this is helpful in some way. SebYB67 (talk) 00:01, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

Move "Preservation and Restoration" Section to the "Piano Roll" Page

The contents of this section are about preserving and restoring piano rolls, not player pianos. This section should be moved to the Piano Roll article.