Thank you, team Volumio! You are life savers for my application!
Am using Volumio in a Raspberry Pi 5 w/hat to drive my player grand piano and its electronic accompaniment system.
Volumio freed me from the terrible CD-based “universal” player piano interface. I have hundreds of CDs and tens of thousands of MIDI sourced songs.
Response seems instant with flawless playback performance. Fixed gain is dead on*–an utter requirement as three different methods of encoding carry the signal to drive the physical piano. If the gain isn’t exactly right the player won’t play correctly or there is a squeal from the electronic accompaniment system as it plays the roughly even sine wave encoding.
*I do wish the fixed adjustment was by the single percent as the 80% I use [might] be a percent or two away from ideal as one type of encoding momentarily squeals before “catching.”
While playback is perfect track numbers and genre are the only things it gleans from my standard .ogg metadata. It also picks up the relatively few (80 or so) syncs to commercial CDs and singles. I use composer and performer as a “dual-category” artist.
Am now working to code the automated process to produce a “Volumio version” for the entire library and later additions. While the coding is nearly complete I’m producing and gathering album cover and artist images. Commercial player piano CDs are extremely rare in the MusicBrainz database. The 900 or so unique album/folder images are nearly complete as are the core composers, performers and artists. I have at least 2,500 “minor” ones left to find/create.
Provided the .jpg files (all sized to 300x300) I include in folders work the way I believe it will be truly wonderful. As long as the thousands of images don’t bog down the system I’ll have amazing access to my collection with a loaded and in use core of 21,000 titles and more than 100,000 awaiting cataloging, conversion and curation.
Of course I’m imagining features that don’t seem to exist…
I’d love to see a video of how this works!
What would you like to see in a video? My excellent if now antiquated Nikon DSLR is my only means of video + audio. I can’t promise anything quickly as my third (uggh!) cervical (neck) fusion surgery is in two weeks and this time the symptoms are systemic instead of confined to my right arm.
Here’s a link to a literal play video during my cleaning/restoration of the piano itself to use the PianoForce Performer player as my literal guide to improvement. This was before I turned my attention to the accompaniment system let alone Volumio as a practical source of control.
I won’t cross-link to my own thread but you’ll find a still, labeled shot of the major components of the accompaniment system in the “DIY Volumio Project” category.
That is so cool! I was really curious how a modern player piano worked with digital files. If I had one, I’d definitely want to set it up to play any song I wanted. Can’t wait to see the Volumio integration.
Good luck with your surgery, hope the third time is the charm!
Modern player pianos are all MIDI players at heart*. MIDI is ideal because a piano is the only inherent MIDI instrument. The very first used cassette tape and pinball machine solenoids to by bought out by Yamaha who used their power control patents in particular. Yamaha and the players the shortly followed all used 3.5" floppies. The first accompaniment systems were also MIDI based using 3.5" floppies and a proprietary MIDI player that received the non player channels for on-the-fly conversion to audio. The “orchestra boxes” I’ve seen have low polyphonic ability and a limited selection of so-so MIDI instrument voices.
All players then migrated to the CD format using similar if distinct “analog MIDI” (as they call it) encoding to drive the player with the other channel carrying .WAV audio. Then they all developed various synch schemes whereby a separate player source operated the player “on top” of commercial audio CDs.
Now they’ve ditched physical media altogether and are selling out old stock. They’ve all moved to the subscription model that is utterly device specific and only uses “their” music. My player, a Pianoforce Performer, has never been associated with any specific music supplier and is designed to be the most universal unit on the market. I can adapt nearly every floppy, CD or newly purchased download to play.
The problem with the PianoForce is its interface. It is utterly designed for CDs that it must first scan to identify producing a “playlist” that serves to define the file. The newest don’t even come with the “unreliable” built-in CD drive! There is one and only one true playlist but not only is it stored in volatile memory but it will not accept songs with accompaniment.
It plays via USB input but treats everything as if they were CDs and still requires the instructive “playlists.” Thus a true playlist has to be a complete physical copy of the songs it contains! The iPad interface is far more convenient than the remote control but it constantly looses connection and is insanely slow when you have a large library like mine. Random play only works within folders, not among them. Worst of all it keeps a copy of the “playlist” instructions in hard memory. Change anything about a folder and the resulting conflict forces it to reload the playlist. Twice now it encountered some sort of fatal error during the playlist reload that physically ruins their permanently soldered/epoxied in custom chip requiring complete control unit replacement.
If you followed my description you will instantly realize that Volumio is an extraordinary improvement in convenience and literal safety for the system.
Wow that is so cool to learn. I figured there had been some advancements but I didn’t really know anything about ones beyond the punch card era.
Sad that they are all going subscription based, but glad that Volumio can keep the options open.
I’m not at all joking when I say that the “punch card” piano rolls were produced by the first ever audio engineers! Hundreds if not thousands of people were employed for the purpose.
To this day piano rolls produced during the first couple decades of the 20th century–particularly for the “expressive” machines that automatically varied expression–remain among the finest player piano performances ever created. I have tens of thousands–literally–of piano rolls converted into MIDI and the work to better interpret the expressive rolls and create expression from the “ordinary” rolls continues to include by my own work.
Like the MIDI files produced in the modern player renaissance c. 1980-2010 the source quality often exceeds the ability of the player itself because like the first generation of electronically controlled automotive engines they lack the ability to self-adjust for both environmental conditions and wear.
The Pianoforce Performer has an incredible self-adjustment system that literally listens to the soundboard via a copper strip as each and every key is optimized for both velocity range and absolute (hammer hits the strings) synchronization.
It was good enough that the installer–my piano/organ pro neighbors–bought a system for their own use and now recommend it over their previous player maker.
One last tidbit: the “fair use” exemption for copyrighted material is the direct result of a ruling regarding player piano rolls. It allows the distribution, sale and profit of “syncs” to commercial, copyrighted music without fee with even public performances of such in such a legal grey area that any sort of copyright challenge–much less penalty–is extremely rare.
“South Park” owes its very existence to player piano rolls! No kidding!