Terry Smythe

This Terry Smythe archive is not part of the Kuhmann Directory. Smythe’s collection reflects the same preservation ethos—capturing and distributing historic piano performances in a durable digital format. If you prefer, you can download all the files at once here.

However, it is stored alongside the Kuhmann collection within this library because it serves a similar preservation purpose: both collections aim to safeguard historical piano repertoire and make it accessible in MIDI format for modern playback systems such as Disklaviers and other MIDI-enabled instruments.

Terry Smythe is a Winnipeg, Manitoba (Canada) collector and roll-scanning pioneer who spent years preserving the musical content of aging paper player-piano rolls by converting them into MIDI files. In his AMICA article Rebirth of the Player Piano, Smythe explains the core preservation problem plainly: player pianos can be restored indefinitely, but original paper rolls inevitably deteriorate, so the practical goal is to capture the roll content digitally before it is lost.

Smythe’s archive is widely known in the mechanical-music community as a large, freely shared collection of MIDI files derived directly from scanned rolls (rather than hand-entered transcriptions). The archive is commonly referenced as ‘Archive of Player Piano Music Rolls in MIDI Format’ and is associated with his ‘Player Piano Rebirth’ pages; it has been cited as containing roughly 5,300 MIDI files of rolls released before 1928, and later updates pushed the total to 6,000+ files, organized in downloadable ‘batches’.

MIDI performances captured from vintage roll perforations via scanning hardware/software, then shared in batch downloads. It preserves performances and repertoire that might otherwise disappear as paper rolls self-destruct with age and use.

Smythe and others have described these roll-scan MIDIs as shared freely but ‘not for commercial use.’