If you’re too young to have heard of a “player piano”, it was a piano that could play a sequence of notes encoded on paper rolls punched with holes. They were popular from the late 1800’s into the 1930s.

Terry Smythe has been using a home-built scanner and software to convert the contents of antique player piano rolls into MIDI files. As a result of this process he has posted almost 3,000 MIDI files, some of which even preserve the playing style of the original performance. Considering that the original paper is well past its sell-by date and already decaying, this is a great way to preserve a chunk of America’s musical history. And a source of tons of MIDI files to play with. [via Make]