Getting a job started
Contact and shipping
One email starts everything. There is no form on this site and no phone number - we are usually in a room with a tape running, and a written description of your collection is worth more to us than a conversation we half remember.
Who to write to
- transfers@wiredrum.llc
- new jobs, quotes, shipping address, scheduling. Fastest route.
- tech@wiredrum.llc
- questions about formats, file specifications, checksums, a delivery that looks wrong
- info@wiredrum.llc
- everything else: teaching sessions, invoices, press, a tape you are not sure is a tape
Email is answered Monday to Thursday, usually within one working day. Anything that arrives after Thursday afternoon waits until Monday, including quotes - Friday is bench day and we would rather tell you that plainly than have you wonder.
What to put in a first email
- A count of items, split by format as best you can tell. «About thirty cassettes and four or five reels» is plenty to quote from.
- Label text, typed out or photographed. Misspelled labels are useful, not embarrassing.
- Where the items have been living: attic, basement, closet, climate-controlled store.
- Any date that matters to you, and why - a memorial, a grant deadline, an exhibition.
- Whether you want restored copies as well as masters, or want to decide after hearing the flat files. Either answer is fine; «decide later» is the common one.
Shipping to us
Get a job number first
We reply to your email with a job number and the street address. Please write the job number on the outside of the box. Items that arrive without one go into a holding shelf until we can match them to an email, and that is the only way we have ever come close to mixing up two collections.
- Use a tracked, insured service. We do not accept items sent without tracking, because «it left here on Tuesday» is not something either of us can act on.
- Pack tape flat, not on its edge. Reels lying flat in a rigid box with crumpled paper around them travel fine. Reels standing on edge arrive with flange damage.
- Do not rewind anything to «tidy it up» before shipping. A tape stored tail-out for thirty years is happier left that way until it is on our transport.
- Leave discs in their sleeves and add a stiffener; lacquer chips at the edge if it can slide.
- Send the box, not just the contents, if the original box has writing on it. The writing is part of the record and we photograph it.
Where we are
Lawrenceville, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15201. The street address goes out with your job number rather than being published here, which keeps unannounced deliveries and sales calls away from a room where someone is aligning a head. If you are coming in person, say so and we will arrange a Thursday slot.
If something is wrong with a delivery
Write to tech@wiredrum.llc with the job number and, if it is a file problem, the output of the manifest check described in the file specification. A failed checksum, a missing side, a file that plays at the wrong speed: all of those are our problem to fix and none of them cost you anything. We hold masters for ninety days precisely so that a bad drive in week six is a non-event.
For reference, our last three redeliveries were caused by: one drive that failed its verification before it ever left the building, one cloud folder a client could not open from a locked-down work laptop, and one job where we had written the wrong year in a filename. All three were found by a check, not by a complaint.