"Mike Rivers" wrote in message
news:znr1110127954k@trad...

In article
writes:

In helping to clear up a friend's estate, I'm having similar problems.
Years of annual requests for disposition instructions for session tapes
have
apparently been ignored by labels and/or artists. My friend should have
disposed of the tapes as he threatened in the letters

You can't just pitch a couple hundred pounds of 24 track
reels into the trash, where some enterprising dumpster diver might dig
them
out.

I'd take the flanges off the reels, saw through the tape with a
bandsaw, sell the reels (premium for boxes with famous names on them)
on eBay, and toss the foot-long pieces of tape. I do this with my
scrap tape that I want to salvage for reels. It's faster, neater and
safer than cutting it with a razor blade.

Then you can see how long it takes for someone to put the scraps back
together and release the "unrealeased recordings."

Okay. Now, let's all tell our favorite story about the
intern/apprentice/new engineer/old hand who used a razor blade to slice off
the junk-stuff reel only to find that it was the master that hadn't been
labeled yet story. Why do these all happen at 2 AM. I do love the band-saw
idea. Two-inch tape is no fun to cut with a razor blade.

Steve King