Cleaning up old analogue tapes and converting to digital

googler

googler wrote: »

As regards transferring them to digital, it might help to know what gear you have already before anyone recommends any more.

...what gear you have already, and what budget you have to work with?

sockdrawer

Thank you so much for the replies.
I was speaking about ordinary audio tapes, but equally, I do have some video tapes which were recorded around the same sort of time (no encryption or anything) that I will need to sort out in the future, so all the information was very useful.
All I have now is an ordinary desktop tape-recorder, sony one, (Clean heads) and my own computer running Windows 7 with a creative soundblaster sound card, however I do have access to a better quality one with an amp if needs be.
I also have a load of smaller DAT tapes which I'm really not sure what to do with as the machine I have been lent by the trust doesn't seem to work.
I can budget around £200 on this for equipment as needed as the trust have a lot of tapes they want to make more accessible to people.

googler

If the background noise on the tapes is constant, such as tape hiss, it's relatively easy to tune that out with Audacity and other processors, but if it's ambient, variable noise, such as traffic, other people talking etc., that's much more difficult.

For distributing on CD, if you import to Audacity, save your project as .WAV or .FLAC, a free download called Burrrn is useful for making CDs from these files. Once you have one CD, copy that either with the same drive or multiple drives if you need lots of copies.

sockdrawer

Thanks googler
I'm hoping to cut out tape hiss, but also a lot of background noise, such as kettles boiling, taps running, that type of thing as the actual voices are nearly drowned out by these several times during one particular recording.
Just looking at Audacity now....

googler

sockdrawer wrote: »

hoping to cut out ..... background noise, such as kettles boiling, taps running, that type of thing

That'll be very difficult, I fear.... but give it a go.