Digitalizing cassettes...

[rdearman]

You can get some cheap working Sony Walkman cassette players on ebay for less than £10. Or I have a really expensive classic old-school Nakamichi cassette player currently retailing for about £2500 if you'd prefer?

[zenmonkey]

You can get some cheap working Sony Walkman cassette players on ebay for less than £10. Or I have a really expensive classic old-school Nakamichi cassette player currently retailing for about £2500 if you'd prefer?

Aaaah. No, thank you. I'm going to stick to eBay and equivalents.

[davidzweig]

If you look for a tape deck on eBay, often you can find those that accept two cassettes, and play them one after the other ('relay play'). That halfs the number of tape swaps you need to do. You can really nice Sony/Yamaha etc. decks for almost free.

Consider cleaning the heads. Make sure the Dolby switch is set correctly for your tape type (put it to 'off', if in doubt). The 'tracking' of the head should hopefully be ok, but can be adjusted on high-end decks.

Set the volume/gain setting so that the highest audio peak reaches -6dB in your recording program. I think cassettes are only capable of about 72dB of range.. so any sound card that is set up correctly, unless it's something truly awful, should be able to capture all the information faithfully.. no need for anything fancy.

For noise reduction, the best software I found some years ago was iZotope RX ($$). Adobe Audition was reasonable too.