Did the same for Laugh Clown, Laugh - set the tempo to 110 bpm:
http://www.pianorollmusic.org/html/mjose/midifiles/NonPDfile...
[1]: https://github.com/FluidSynth/fluidsynth/wiki/SoundFont
[2]: https://wiki.videolan.org/Midi/
(I'm posting this because the vlc wiki is stale and sent me down a pointless rabbit hole on fluidsynth's old sourceforge site. I'd rather update the wiki. It tells me I need to create an account. When I try it tells me I don't have permission.)
Some software I wrote for piano roll analysis and transcription:
- Unroll: https://zulko.github.io/unroll-online/ - upload a piano roll midi file and have it quantized and converted to lilypond sheet music. More about the process in this blog: https://zulko.github.io/blog/2014/02/12/transcribing-piano-r...
- Pianola: https://zulko.github.io/pianola/ - upload a piano roll midi file, and it plays with the piano roll and keyboard animation (you can zoom on some parts, slow down etc).
Some transcriptions made with these tools:
- Hindustan: https://github.com/Zulko/sheet-music--hindustan
- Gershwin - Sweet and Lowdown: https://github.com/Zulko/sheet-music--Gershwin-sweet-and-low...
- Gershwin - Limehouse Nights: https://github.com/Zulko/-sheet-music--Gerhswin-Limehouse-Ni...
It was also a time when all these midi files started being available, like the 6000 rolls from Terry Smythe [2], and I figured out transcribing these could be a good way to learn old-school Jazz, which is otherwise difficult to find as sheet music.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BX9MCyO6smk
[2] https://archive.org/details/terrysmythe.ca-archive/mp3s/Ampi...
There isn't a huge market for piano roll recordings, and these recordings are rare. It's a niche topic that can attract
- Older people who have known the time piano rolls (say, until the 1950s)
- People nostagic of old times in general (in particular the 1910s-1940s), the age of early jazz with stride piano and early Broadway.
- Music scholars, because some of these rolls are of historical/musical importance, in particular those "recorded" by George Gershwin or Fats Waller and other big names. A lot of material exists only as piano rolls.
For the example of the Gershwin CD I posted above, it was produced by musicologist Artis Wodehouse [1] in parnership with the yamaha disklavier pianos iirc [2], so my guess is this was a passion project above all, with a bit of Yamaha marketing.
[1] https://www.artiswodehouse.com/biography/ [2] https://usa.yamaha.com/products/musical_instruments/pianos/d...
I've seen pianola rolls and even played one as a child. But I have wondered as an adult what the 'listening quality' of the music is / would be. What got you into them and could you share -- if you want to nerd out please do, I'm genuinely interested! -- what interested you about them?
How did the Welte-Mignon actually work? It seems almost miraculous that the dynamics can be captured on a piano roll and replayed successfully. Not perfectly, as you say, but pretty damn close.
>Because of U.S. copyright restrictions, only songs published in 1929 and earlier available for public download from this page.
I mean, I understand copyright and public domain law in the US, but what exactly is the point of a list of things you can't share?
irrational•6mo ago
I assume we hugged it to death.
ncr100•6mo ago
Or visit https://web.archive.org/web/20250716215135/http://www.pianor... to see SOME of the files. Sadly not the MIDI files ... which IMO are the meat of value of this HN post.