# Advice what can i do with my father's music collection



## tonrasmith (Jan 18, 2021)

Hello
My father loved classical music. He always purchased albums and traded albums. He recorded music for his listening for his lifetime.
I currently have 400 cassette tapes (600 hours) . The music is neatly indexed in books and the tapes are new and clean. I inquired about moving it to digital and was quoted $8000.
I don't want all this music to go to waste. There might be something rare in there.
i am looking for some advice if I could donate this music somewhere? Or somewhere i can post the collection? Would someone enjoy receiving this music for their listening.
Thank You for your time,
Tonra


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

tonrasmith said:


> Hello
> My father loved classical music. He always purchased albums and traded albums. He recorded music for his listening for his lifetime.
> I currently have 400 cassette tapes (600 hours) . The music is neatly indexed in books and the tapes are new and clean. I inquired about moving it to digital and was quoted $8000.
> I don't want all this music to go to waste. There might be something rare in there.
> ...


Cassette is generally not the first choice for access to classical music, but I still have several dozen tapes (which I originally purchased for use in my vehicle, back when they had cassette players) and I still have a quality cassette deck incorporated in my system. So I understand your father's passion.

It seems you are talking about recordings on tape rather than purchased cassettes. That will make a difference as far as selling goes. Factory tapes may have some value. I wonder what happened to the records your father taped from.

Hammacher Schlemmer (and other retailers) sell a cassette to digital player/recorder for about 60 dollars. I have one. If you wish to preserve some of those cassettes for your own use through your laptop or however digitally, you might consider this. It's certainly a lot cheaper than that (I would say, ridiculously high) quote you were given. All you need is time -- put in the cassette along with a flash drive and press the right buttons.

There may be used record/disc/tape shops in your area that will purchase your collection outright. You suggest the tapes are well cared for and catalogued. This should appeal to a used seller. You might check at Discogs with a few of the titles to see what the going rate for some of the cassettes are.

Here's a link that will access the cassette pages at Discogs: https://www.discogs.com/search/?format_exact=Cassette

and for strictly classical: https://www.discogs.com/search/?format_exact=Cassette&genre_exact=Classical

You'll find a wide range of pricing. If you can get a dollar apiece for your tapes you might be getting a bargain from a re-seller. Of course, there are probably quite a few rare items in the collection, and they may go for well beyond that price. A little time investment looking around may pay some dividends.

If you can get to the re-seller's shop, take a look around and see what kinds of prices are on the classical tapes. This will give you a better idea of what to sell for. If you can average half-price the seller's price you may make out well in a sale of the tapes.

I'm sure others here may have additional advice.

All the best.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

tonrasmith said:


> Hello
> My father loved classical music. He always purchased albums and traded albums. He recorded music for his listening for his lifetime.
> I currently have 400 cassette tapes (600 hours) . The music is neatly indexed in books and the tapes are new and clean. I inquired about moving it to digital and was quoted $8000.
> I don't want all this music to go to waste. There might be something rare in there.
> ...


If you think about it, 600 hours of tapes being converted for 8 hours a day is actually 75 days'-worth of work. So your quote was for about $100 per day, or about $12.50 an hour. Which doesn't seem unreasonable, to be honest. Obviously, commercial conversion services will be doing multiple tapes at once and so on, which affects the value proposition... but if I as a one-man-band was going to quote you, I think it would be somewhere in that ball-park for that quantity of music.

Anyway, for you to copy that stuff to digital yourself, you'll be on a learning curve, have to buy some hardware, and will probably want to edit each digital copy to put in track index marks and the like, meaning learning the Audacity software and so on. It's a tall order, I think, if you've not done it before. You'll be spending more than three months of your life, I think, achieving it.

If the tapes are 'home brew' (i.e., copied by your father off his own LPs) rather than 'commercial', then selling them might be legally tricky, and I doubt anyone else would be wanting to touch them, sold or not, on much the same grounds. But I wonder if you have (a) a local library that might be able to use them or (b) a local aged care residential venue which might want to loan them out to the residents? That would be an audience that might particularly appreciate a non-techie, non-digital approach to music consumption, such as cassette tapes represent.


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## mbhaub (Dec 2, 2016)

If these are commercially produced, dump them. There is nothing from that era on cassette that isn't on CD.


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## tonrasmith (Jan 18, 2021)

Thank you for your input. These cassettes were taped by father and are not commercial tapes. They used to be on reel to reel and he moved them to cassettes. I understand the copy right laws might be an issue. I appreciate the idea of the aged care residential facility. That might be my best option.
Thank You again for your time


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## tonrasmith (Jan 18, 2021)

Thank you for this information and the link for the cassette types. Looking for a reseller is a great idea.


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## tonrasmith (Jan 18, 2021)

These are all recorded from albums. They used to be on reel to reel and now are on cassette. I appreciate your input.
Thank You


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## NoCoPilot (Nov 9, 2020)

Recorded from LPs onto reel-to-reels, then dubbed to cassette? Unless there’s something ultra-rare there’s no value there.


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## pianozach (May 21, 2018)

3rd generation cassettes. Likely there's a significant amount of hiss on these recordings. Unless there is something ultra special somewhere on these, they have no value. You won't find a buyer, and it's unlikely that even a library would want them. Even a thrift store is unlikely to take them.

It sounds as though your father did record trading. He'd get new albums, record them, then trade them for new albums, and record them, etc.

They are of value only to you and your father. Collecting the music and cataloging them probably brought him great joy.

You can purchase a cassette player with a USB port, and play them into your computer: Yes! *Audacity* is fine software for this, and I think that there is a free version that has all you'd need. But you could likely use any DAW to do this. I think most computers come with some sort of DAW software (for Apples and Macs, it used to be Garage Band, and probably still is).

However, converting will have to happen in "real time", so if you converted one tape every day, it will take you 400 days.

I have a record player with a USB port, and 400 albums, but I find I can't really be bothered, as a record player takes up a good amount of space.


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## pianozach (May 21, 2018)

tonrasmith said:


> Hello
> My father loved classical music. He always purchased albums and traded albums. He recorded music for his listening for his lifetime.
> I currently have 400 cassette tapes (600 hours) . The music is neatly indexed in books and the tapes are new and clean. I inquired about moving it to digital and was quoted $8000.
> I don't want all this music to go to waste. There might be something rare in there.
> ...


Actually, it might be worth looking at a couple of pages from his indexed books, just to get a better sense of what we're looking at.


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