I clicked on the link guessing, and then hoping, that it would have MIDI files of the piano rolls. Not so, but archive.org has at least 14,233: https://archive.org/details/pianorollmusic.com-midifiles
What sparked my curiosity is 21 Pianomation Floppy disks that arrived yesterday with a recently eBay’d Yamaha Midi Data Filer 3. Pianomation is a system QRS corporation fits on grand pianos to allow them to operate as player pianos.
QRS is still in business and started out making piano rolls around 1900 and quickly invented a machine to record pianists live performances. https://www.qrsmusic.com/
Anyway, the floppy disks are approximately album length collections of Midi files and quite a few of the Midi files say who played the piano. Given when some of the players died, the Midi is almost certainly converted from piano rolls.
I’ve been playing them back through a Yamaha General Midi era piano voice…and $10,000 hands on a two dollar guitar surely does sound better than two dollar hands on a $10,000 guitar.
But Liberace might be spinning in his grave…I ran his data into the Honky Tonk Piano.
I expect to test the rest of them…I suspect they all work…then resell them on eBay.
Backing up data is not a hobby that interests me, hard copy rolls exist, the company is still in business, and the files are still under copyright.
At 10000 rpm, not one less.
"White-Smith Music Publishing Company v. Apollo Company, 209 U.S. 1 (1908), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States which ruled that manufacturers of music rolls for player pianos did not have to pay royalties to the composers."
"The main issue was whether or not something had to be directly perceptible (meaning intelligible to an ordinary human being) for it to be a "copy."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-Smith_Music_Publishing_C...
Why doesn't the same argument apply to a CD? or an MP3?
Works (sheet music and lyrics) and recordings (committing it to media or storage) and performances can be distinctly copyrighted and separately licensed. But a CD track represents all 3 of those put together through “sweat of the brow”, usually by multiple parties.