Via Boingboing I have just downloaded over 2000 midi piano tunes to my laptop. Why on earth would I do that, you say? Because these midi files are painstalkingly made from piano rolls. In other words, we get all the popular music from about 1890 to 1915, often played by the original artists. We have Joplin playing Joplin, Rachmaninov playing Rachmaninov, and a huge library of music from a forgotten time, played by some really good pianists.
A piano roll records a great deal of the style of the performance. It captures the rhythm with perfect precision, and also pedal use. Dynamics were entered manually into the piano rolls, but apparently with great care, because the performances sound quite life-like. My wife had heard a piano-roll of Rachmaninov, she initially believed that the dynamics were also recorded. And that says something, because my wife - well, let's just say she knows a lot about piano music, particularly russian performances.
The only drawback is that soundblaster MIDI is so poor (and probably poorly implemented in Linux, since people who really care about MIDI use something better) that everything sounds like it's played on a really inferior piano - without any pedals. My midi player doesn't seem to care about the pedal encoding. That means that most of the classical music is bad, but the ragtime and popular tunes are quite acceptable, and after all they constitute 90% of the collection.
Any drawbacks? Well, they don't licence it as liberally as they should, IMO. True, they put down a lot of work into this, but they base themselves on public domain material, and I think they agree with me that although scanning is a great work, the pianists' work is greater. Since they work for preservation of these works, they should remember that nothing hurts preservation like restrictive copyright controls.
That said, I only use the music for my personal enjoyment as is permitted, so I suppose it doesn't hurt me all that much :-) Quite the opposite. I love it.
Posted by vintermann at April 10, 2005 08:02 PM