How to Convert WordStar Files to Plain Text (ASCII) and Microsoft Word

You have a bunch of old WordStar files from the 1980s. When you open one of these files in NotePad or Microsoft Word or some other modern word processing program, you see lot of gibberish:

  ma i rubbe hosin dow hi a 1 noon 
  shor broo i th othe hand.

Typical Gibberish-Greek Contained in 1980s-era WordStar Files

Skip the Story and Go to the Instructions

You search the web for a simple and free solution to your problem of converting WordStar files to plain text files. You read the Wikipedia article on WordStar. You try the conversion program recommended by the UCLA Knowledge Base. You try add-ons converters to Microsoft Word. But nothing works.

Finally, you come across this WordStar discussion page on archiveteam.org:

Playing The Piano Ryuichi Sakamoto Rar Access

Moreover, “rar” is a homophone for “rare.” And rare, in the context of Sakamoto’s final years, is exactly what his live piano performances became. After his cancer diagnosis, he performed rarely, and only in spaces of profound acoustic clarity—such as the 2018 concert Ryuichi Sakamoto: Playing the Piano for the Ishibashi in a near-empty Tokyo studio. These performances were not released commercially in many regions; they circulated via fan-uploaded .rar files on forums and torrent sites. Thus, the search query becomes a digital elegy. Each download is a small act of preservation against the silence that followed his death in March 2023. Finally, “Playing the Piano Ryuichi Sakamoto Rar” invites us to reconsider what we value in recorded music. In an age of autotune and grid-snapped quantization, Sakamoto’s piano recordings are defiantly imperfect. On the track “Lost Child” from Playing the Piano , you can hear the felt hammers striking strings with an almost percussive thud. On “Parolibre,” a melodic line falters and recovers. These are not errors; they are testimonies.

When you finally decompress that .rar file, you do not find a product. You find a presence. You find the late-night recording sessions, the abandoned concert halls, the cancer-weak hands that still found the strength to press a chord. You find what Sakamoto called “the sound of the piano being itself, before any composer gets in the way.” In that sense, the .rar is not a compression. It is a liberation—a small, quiet rebellion against the forgetfulness of time. And that, precisely, is the rarest thing of all. Playing The Piano Ryuichi Sakamoto Rar

The .rar file, often containing a “proof” file (a checksum or a recovery volume), exists to ensure data integrity. But Sakamoto’s art in his final decade was precisely the opposite: it celebrated data’s fragility. To search for a .rar of Playing the Piano is to seek a perfect copy of an imperfect performance. It is to acknowledge that the most profound musical experiences are not those that are lossless, but those that are lossy—that carry the scars of their own making. The search query “Playing the Piano Ryuichi Sakamoto Rar” is, in the end, a contemporary haiku. It contains a man (Sakamoto), an action (playing), an object (piano), and a format (rar). It speaks to the loneliness of the digital archivist, the greed of the fan who wants what is not easily streamed, and the grief of a world that can no longer hear Sakamoto’s fingers touch the keys. Moreover, “rar” is a homophone for “rare

When you search for “Playing the Piano Ryuichi Sakamoto Rar,” you are searching for an artifact of that late style. Unlike the bombastic Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983) or the kinetic Rain from The Last Emperor , the pieces on Playing the Piano —such as “Bibo no Aozora,” “The Sheltering Sky,” and “Energy Flow”—are exposed. They are not compositions for piano; they are conversations with the piano. The .rar file, often containing bonus tracks or alternate takes not found on streaming services, becomes a metaphor for these hidden dialogues. The listener is not a fan; they are an archaeologist, excavating the moments where Sakamoto’s fingers hesitated, where a chord was held a half-second too long, where the piano itself seemed to breathe. There is a deep irony in the search for a “rar” file of a pianist who distrusted digital abundance. Sakamoto was a vocal critic of streaming economics, arguing that it devalued the labor of sound. He once said, “Music is becoming like water—free, abundant, and tasteless.” By seeking a compressed archive, the listener is performing a contradictory act: they are using the tools of digital replication to access an experience that resists replication—the singular, unrepeatable moment of a solo piano in a resonant space. Thus, the search query becomes a digital elegy

When a user appends “.rar” to this title, they are not just looking for a file. They are seeking a compressed, portable, almost secret version of intimacy. The act of decompressing a .rar file mirrors the act of listening to Playing the Piano : both processes require patience, a breaking of the surface to reach the raw data underneath. In Sakamoto’s own words from his 2017 album async , “I am searching for a sound that is not a note.” The .rar file, in its digital compression, is also a search—for the sound that streaming’s lossless promise cannot quite capture: the quiet hum of the recording room, the faint creak of the piano stool, the breath between phrases. To understand the rarity implied by the search, one must understand the physical and philosophical context of its creation. Playing the Piano was released in 2009, but its spiritual genesis lies in the 2000s, when Sakamoto began moving away from electronic experimentation toward a neoclassical, almost glacial minimalism. This period culminated in his score for The Revenant (2015) and his final album 12 (2023). Crucially, Sakamoto recorded Playing the Piano after being diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014 and later rectal cancer. His late style is defined by what musicologist Edward Said called “late style”—a quality of unresolved contradiction, of asceticism and alienation.

[Optional geek explanation: WordStar encodes the last character of each word by setting the high-order bit of the binary character representation. The program simply resets the high-order bit of all characters in the file, changing the goofy characters into normal ones.]

You install Perl on your computer and you try out the script. It works! The program reads the WordStar file named in.ws, converts the Greek-like characters to ordinary text, and writes out a new file, out.txt in ordinary plain text format, which you can read into NotePad, Microsoft Word, or practically any modern program.

But you have to modify the file names inside the script (in.ws and out.txt) for each file conversion. You want to automate the process of converting lots of WordStar files. But you don't know anything about Perl programming. You ask your office co-worker who knows Perl to modify the script to make it do what you want. Here's what you get:

opendir my $dir, "." or die "Cannot open directory: $!";
my @files = readdir $dir;
closedir $dir;

foreach $file (@files) {
    unless (($file =~ /^[A-Za-z0-9_\s\-]*$/) && (-f $file)) {
        print "  Skipped $file\n";
        next;
    }
    open OUTFILE, ">$file.txt";
    open INFILE, "<$file";
    while (<INFILE>)
    {
        tr [\200-\377] [\000-\177];
        print OUTFILE $_;
    }
    close INFILE;
    close OUTFILE;
    print "  Read $file, wrote $file.txt ...\n";
}
sleep (5);

The program looks at all the files in the same directory where the program resides. If a file name consists of only letters, numerals, underscores, hyphens, and space characters, it assumes that it's a WordStar file; it converts the file to plain text and writes it out as a new file with ".txt" appended to the file name. It leaves the original WordStar file unchanged.

The program ignores any file whose name contains any other characters, such as the period character in an extension like .doc or .jpg. If you have a WordStar file named with an extension such as MYPAPER.783, you'll first need to rename it (or copy it to a new file) and use a new name such as MYPAPER783 or MYPAPER 783 (with a space replacing the dot). 


Instructions for Converting WordStar Files to Text

First of all, you need to have the Perl computer language installed on your computer. If you're working on a Mac or Unix/Linux system, you're in luck because Perl comes pre-installed. (If you're using Linux, see Note 4 below.)

If you're working on Windows, you can download and install Perl for free from perl.org:

Perl - Download website: https://www.perl.org/get.html      (Not necessary for Mac or Unix/Linux)

Scroll down to find your computer operating system. For Windows, you're offered different versions of Perl. I used the first one, ActiveState Perl. Click the download button and follow the instructions to download and install Perl.

After Perl is installed, you need to put a small program called convert.pl in the directory containing your old WordStar file. You can either download the from this website or you can create the file yourself (open a text editor such as Notepad, copy the text below, paste it into your text editor, and save the file under the name convert.pl). 

To download from this website:

1. Click the following download link: convert.txt
2. Save the file
3. Rename the file to "convert.pl" (change the "txt" to "pl" in the file name)
4. Copy the file to each directory containing WordStar files

OR use a text editor to create a text file named convert.pl containing the following text:

opendir my $dir, "." or die "Cannot open directory: $!";
my @files = readdir $dir;
closedir $dir;

foreach $file (@files) {
    unless (($file =~ /^[A-Za-z0-9_\s\-]*$/) && (-f $file)) {
        print "  Skipped $file\n";
        next;
    }
    open OUTFILE, ">$file.txt";
    open INFILE, "<$file";
    while (<INFILE>)
    {
        tr [\200-\377] [\000-\177];
        print OUTFILE $_;
    }
    close INFILE;
    close OUTFILE;
    print "  Read $file, wrote $file.txt ...\n";
}
sleep (5);

In a file browser, go to the WordStar directory and run the convert.pl program (in Windows, double-click the icon in the folder). Voila! The program converts your WordStar files to plain text and writes them out as new files in the same directory, with ".txt" appended to the file name. You can open these files in Microsoft Word and most other programs.

This is what you can expect to see when you run the convert.pl program:

WordStar to Text Conversion Directory   WordStar to Text Conversion Report

Important Notes

Note 1: The program only converts files whose names contain only letters, numbers, underscores, hyphens, and space characters. If you have a WordStar file named with an extension such as MYPAPER.783, you'll first need to rename it or copy it to a new file and choose a new name without using the dot character, for example, MYPAPER783 or MYPAPER 783 (with a space replacing the dot).

Note 2: The convert.pl program leaves your original WordStar files unchanged. However, when it writes out the filename.txt file, it doesn't check to see if there's an existing file of the same name. It simply overwrites the existing file. Before you run the convert.pl program, make sure you don't have any existing .txt files that you would mind losing.

Note 3: On my Windows 10 PC, the first time I double-clicked the convert.pl icon, Windows asked me which program I wanted to use to open the file, and offered several choices. I clicked on "Perl Command Line Interpreter", and then the program ran in the wrong directory (the Perl installation directory). This had no effect, because it simply skipped all the files (they all had file name extensions). After that, double-clicking the icon always worked on the local directory, as it should.

Note 4: For Linux (operating system) users, I got the following note from a reader.

The Perl script doesn't run as-is on Unix-like systems when one double-clicks on the icon.  It's an easy fix, though. Add this line to the top of the file:

#!/usr/bin/perl

Perl treats it as a comment and ignores it, but the Bash shell in Linux sees the #! in the first two bytes and then knows that the path to the program that will run the executable script follows on the same line.  Microsoft Windows does it by filename extension, but Unix/Linux doesn't give a whit about filename extensions when it comes to deciding what interpreter to use: It's all in the text that follows the "hash-bang" (#!).

If the user knows that their Perl interpreter is located elsewhere, in a non-standard location or with a different name, they're probably savvy enough to modify the path in the Perl script as needed.  The code will still run fine on Windows systems with the modification.

2016 Gray Chang
Thanks to Dan White (no relation to Moscone/Milk figure) for Perl programming assistance
Thanks to Andrew Poth for Note 4 about Linux