Tue Jan 22, 2019 5:37 pm
The player instruments from Moller, Estey, Aeolian, and so forth were all custom made for their wealthy clients, and the particular dispositions of those organs were the individual clients personal choice. The organs were played by paper rolls with registrations that could be customized within the console to play the ranks that were available. There are a number of people who today collect those rolls, and modern recuts of many of those rolls are also in circulation. One can hear many of these rolls on Youtube by searching for player pipe organs, Aeolian player organs, and the like. I personally have an Aeolian console player, and about 75 recut Aeolian rolls that I can play on my own 24 rank pipe organ. I suppose I could record them as midi files with the Hauptwerk recorder, as my pipe organ runs with the Artisan midi system, and I do play my Hauptwerk organs with that system. There are several people who are making midi files of player pipe organ rolls. The difficulty however is the software to chose the appropriate stops for any particular midi organ. The software for my system was custom designed for the available ranks in my residence organ. To play back to a Hauptwerk sampleset would require custom programing for that sampleset, and would require a lot of time and work. I think that the appeal for that would be too limited for any commercial experiments.
James