Little help fixing a price

Got a client (doctor) who wants about 100 hours of lectures on casette tape converted to mp3's to put on his ipod.Very simple for me to do and though I don't have to sit there watching every minute it will take about 102 hours to do.Not having ever done something this big I don't have a clue as what to charge for this.When all said and done I will end up with about 830 megs of mp3's.I have all the tools and only needed to buy a $3 cable.I looked around on line for pricing and found some between $70 - $ 80.To me this is absurd and I would have a hard time spitting those numbers out to anyone.What do you think?






_________________


The Ride

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: FoMoCo on 1/5/05 10:30am ]</font>

That does seem like a lot of money, being as how you don't have to do much more than switch tapes and encode. I suppose a bit more time at the end once it's all into MP3 depending on how he wants it broken up.

Out of curiosity, what software are you going to use to do this? I would suggest you use VBR to encode it, to keep size down but not sacrifice much quality (320kb/s is over 2 MB/min). I suppose again, that depends on what he wants. Personally I can tell the difference between 320 kb/s and VBR with the highest quality and allowing up to 320 kb/s. I've tried a few different encoders and I can tell the difference with every encoder I've tried.

In any case, I often have a hard time deciding what to charge people for jobs. Often times the figure I come up with from x to come out plus y multiplied by how many hours it took seems like a lot of money. Often times I'll just try to come up with a figure that seems reasonable to me for the difficulty of what I did and how frustrating it was to fix. That or I'll ask what they feel is appropriate sometimes if it's a less formal thing. I don't know about audio encoding jobs though, as I've never done any for anyone. Just stuff for myself.

Sorry I couldn't be more help but there you have my ramblings, for whatever it's worth.

FoMo...do you have an hourly rate? How much time are you going to have to put into it? Remember if he has to get it done at a "business" he will be paying for all their overhead too! Dont cut yourself short buddy..this is your living for now.
[addsig]

70-80 is a decent price. I'd do it for around 50-60. Just think, maybe an hour or two per tape, so if its 2 hours, you have 50 times you have to switch and start the encoding, say it takes you 5 minutes to switch a tape, thats 250 minutes, or just over 4 hours of your time. Plus you have to babysit it to switch the tapes. Being that it is only lectures, you wont need to keep the bitrate too high, i'd do like 96kbps, or maybe 128kbps max vbr.
[addsig]

My repair rate is $25 an hour ( to cheap)or flat rate on certain jobs.I have to be realistic and $2500 is not.I was thinking about just telling him I don't know what to charge and see what he says.I was thinking in the $500 range since actual working time will be much less than 100 hours.adgdghr I use the creative labs recorder that came with my audigy card to record from the tape deck then use cdex to convert the wav to mp3.Seeing they are lectures I can do it in mono and low bit rate to keep the size down and they still sound good.

Brian this is a repeat customer and the type I want,just guess I'm affraid of bidding to low yet I dont want him saying are you insane[img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_lol.gif[/img]

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: FoMoCo on 1/5/05 11:27am ]</font>

Hey if its a good customer..cut him your good deal...do the job and see how it goes..it will give you a better idea for the future jobs.[img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_cool.gif[/img]
[addsig]