What is a reasonable price to charge per cassette rip?

[endymion]

Hello. A group of people have offered me to transfer important lectures and other relevant speeches from cassettes to CD. I will be using Presonus's FireBox with WXP. I plan to transfer each tape into a CD with all info provided on a sticker/CD label and place them on either a slim case or a paper sleeve. I also plan to use decent audio CD-Rs like Verbatim or TDK. Should I rip to mp3 or WAV for better audio quality?

Besides quality, what would be a reasonable price to charge per CD (perhaps an hour each) based on the above mentioned? I was thinking something like $5 to $7 for each CD-R, should I charge more?

Thanks.

[kozikowski]

<<<Presonus's FireBox with WXP.>>>

Is that Windows XP? We warn against abbreviations on the forum. About a third of us are from different platforms. I use an MBP.

As a fuzzy rule, you should keep everything in 44100, 16-bit, Stereo through the whole pipeline.
That's the Music CD standard and, depending on which software you're going to use for CD authoring, there is no standards conversion, no compression damage, and no confusion anywhere in the process.

Sometimes compression and damage sneaks in anyway. Windows Media always converts everything down to Windows Media format and then back up again to CDA. You can prevent iTunes from converting internally -- twice -- if you know where to look.

The material cost for this task is trivial, so you need to know how much your time is worth. What would happen to your business plan if the computer failed? What happens when it fills up?

Koz

[endymion]

Is that Windows XP?

What would happen to your business plan if the computer failed? What happens when it fills up?

Yes, Windows XP.

The computer has no reason to fail and I have enough space. Possibilities of failure aside, do you think $7 per CD is too much ?
I don't want to rip anyone off or make them turn away but then, like you said, I guess I would have to see how much is my time worth.

I am not much of a business man so my concepts regarding this, are quite inaccurate.

Thanks for the feedback !

[kozikowski]

What do other company's charge?

Koz

[kozikowski]

http://www.disk.com/pages/audiotape_dup ... agodHCqNPg

Koz

[billw58]

http://www.disk.com/pages/audiotape_dup ... agodHCqNPg

Koz

That link looks like audio cassette duplication, not transfer to CD.

Try a search for "LP to CD". You'll find prices ranging from $50 to $5 per cassette!

For example: http://lp2cd.com/prices_cassette.htm#Co ... price_list on the high end, and
http://www.reclaimmedia.com/prices.html on the low end of the price scale.

In both cases the customer pays for shipping both ways, which should factor in to what you charge.

Personally, I think you could safely charge $10 per transfer complete with CD cover insert and slim jewel case.

-- Bill

[endymion]

Thanks Bill.

Luckily for them, they are all locally based. I was looking at some other websites prior to your reply and prices go around the same.
I guess $10 is not high at all for this project, based on how I plan to go about it. Now I feel more confident to start negotiating with them.

Thanks again to all.