Topic: Paderewski in your living room - pianoteq 8 - welte mignon
A research team from Stanford University (see attribution) digitized "welte-mignon piano rolls" to midi-files. The method has been described in the research paper cited below. The files and xml-metadata-sidecar-files are provided as the "supra dataset" on github, see https://supra.stanford.edu/about/
I took these files and wrote a bash script which then uses pianoteq headless to do batch conversion of the midi-files to mp3 using my favorite pianoteq preset. You find all the details as a tutorial here:
Thus you can conveniently browse the full collection as mp3 and dive deep into those historic performances. The sound and listening quality is amazing, although welte-mignon seems to have some restrictions in capturing details or exact timing.
Attribution:
Zhengshan Shi, Craig Stuart Sapp, Kumaran Arul, Jerry McBride, Julius O. Smith III. SUPRA: Digitizing the Stanford University Piano Roll Archive. In Proceedings of the 20th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR), pages 517-523, Delft, The Netherlands, 2019.
Maybe you have a pianoteq preset which does a better rendering?
Thanks and enjoy!
