On 03/17/2016 05:47 PM, James Saxe jim.saxe@gmail.com [trad-dance-callers] wrote:

That's about what I can think of for now. I'd be interested
in information about good products to help with any of the
tasks I've described, but the ones I consider most important
are

* doing the initial capture to WAVE format,

* cutting some of the tape hiss and transport noise, and

* applying and labelling index marks so that I can jump
quickly to whatever segment I want to listen to, without
a lot of fast-forwarding, overshooting, rewinding, etc.

Jim, Audacity will cover at least the first two items above. I can't speak for the third. It's open source, so the price is right, and is available on Windows, Unix/Linux, and MacOS X.

The Audacity folks even have some decent docs concerning workflow -- getting from raw source material to reasonable recordings.

This document talks about how tapes are made and describes the various failure modes of magnetic tape, and has some observations regarding the longevity of the medium:

I would recommend taking a newer cassette that you don't care so much about, and use it to get the first step (transfer from magnetic medium to .wav file) down. Especially with the older tapes, you might get one shot at getting it right.

--Nick