The Buffalo Convention of December 10, 1908 established two future roll formats for the US-producers of piano roll

Piano roll

A piano roll is a music storage medium used to operate a player piano, piano player or reproducing piano. A piano roll is a continuous roll of paper with perforations punched into it. The peforations represent note control data...

s for self-playing piano

Player piano

A player piano is a self-playing piano, containing a pneumatic or electro-mechanical mechanism that operates the piano action via pre-programmed music perforated paper, or in rare instances, metallic rolls. The rise of the player piano grew with the rise of the mass-produced piano for the home in...

s. The two formats had different punchings of 65 and 88 notes, but the same width (11 1/4 inches or 285 mm). This made it possible to play the piano rolls on any self-playing instrument built according to the convention, albeit sometimes with a loss of special functionality. This format became a loose world standard.