Restoring old tape recording - help?

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Oldwood

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A friend of mine on a guitar forum has an old cassette tape that has sentimental value and needs help restoring it. Suggestions as to what it would cost to have done professionally or any other help would be appreciated. I hope this is the right place to post this thread. I'm kinda new here.

Here's his original post:

To whom it may interest,

My uncle was 20 years old when he passed away, due to a heart condition. In his teen years, he loved to listen, play and to record music. I have in my possession, a tape of some of his recordings. What can I do to recover the sounds. This tape was used over.. and over and re-recorded over. So as you can imagine, the quality isn't so good.

It would mean a ton to my Dad and his family if I could take this tape and make a quality recovery of the recordings. Does anyone have any suggestions or techniques that may help me in my quest.

Bear in mind, this tape was done in mid 1980's. It has been fast forwarded, rewinded and recorded using cheap equipment.

Has anyone been in a similar situation?
Do I have any hope?
Click to expand...

Thanks if you can help.
 
it's possible...but it all depends on how much money you want to spend. call around to your local recording studios to see if they have the equipment needed to restore the tape. more than likely they'll want to hear the tape to tell you if they can even do anything with it. noise reduction plugins or hardware units can do wonders...but not miracles. so don't expect it to sound crystal clear. depending on where you live, there also may be facilities that specialize in restoring audio and video.
 
Thanks bennychico11, I just got copies of the recordings in wma format. I'll be checking them out a little later.
 
I restored a tape like that a while back. It was a cassette that had been dubbed on some unknown deck probably 20 years ago from an even older reel-to-reel (I believe the original recordings were made in 1970 or thereabouts). These were live recorded reminisces and unaccompanied singing of an aged uncle of the owner of the tape. It took me the better part of a week, using Cool Edit Pro and all of its NR tricks, to get something I could burn to CD.

And that wasn't as bad as the long-distance telephone conversations from the '60's taped via a cheap recording device onto cassette. I spent several hours figuring out a strategy for making them intelligible, then showed the owner how to do it (he had CEP 1.2), and gave them back.

In other words, it is labor-intensive. As a general rule, the same tricks will work for the whole tape, but you will find parts that need special treatment.

Good luck.
 
I have done a few, and no two are exactly the same. you just have to approach it from a "see what needs to be done" angle and try to do it. This is one area where an exciter can actually come in handy sometimes.
 
lpdeluxe said:
And that wasn't as bad as the long-distance telephone conversations from the '60's taped via a cheap recording device onto cassette. I spent several hours figuring out a strategy for making them intelligible, then showed the owner how to do it (he had CEP 1.2), and gave them back.
Click to expand...

i did the exact same thing too. but it was a tape from the 2004s. ya think even cheap cassette recorders would have gotten better over 30-40 years. lol
:cool:
 
I've been trying to use noise reduction, but I'm having trouble getting rid of hiss without wrecking the rest of it. I've had luck removing hum, but the hiss is proving impossible (so far). I tried Audacity first, not much luck. I have n-Track, but I'm still learning how to use it (version 4.04).
 
the Waves Resortation bundle is some of the best noise reduction plugins i've heard of so far. The Digidesign DINR is pretty good...but only for PT.
you wanna throw a sample my way and I'll see what I can do with it? it'll at least let you know if it can be done with homestudio plugins or not.
 
I think I might have the story that beats them all. Some guy came in with a cassette that was made in the 70's of a 78rpm record that was made in the 40's recorded right off a radio broadcast of a live band. The guy was the (upright) bass player. I worked on this stuff for 3 weeks trying to dig through the hiss and other garbage to find the music. It never ended up sounding all that great, but I was able to bring out the bass and that made the guy happy.
 
hahaha...nice one Farview.

oldwood-
after listening to it and playing around with it, i'd say there's a possibility that someone can do something with it. I've heard worse. First off there is a DC offset problem which is a minor thing. second there's the noise of the cassette and then a second set of noise when the audio actually starts (you can hear the noise change once they come in with the song). The noise of the cassette should be real easy to fix as I was able to play around with it and get rid of just it. But when the audio comes in, that's another task all together. It sounds almost like computer noise which seems to diminish and then come back during the quieter parts (almost like a bad compressor setting).
so in short...call around to the studios and see if you can take it by. but don't expect to get it cheaply done. like Farview said...sometimes it can take a very long time for a person to clean it up. And if you're paying by the hour...eek, the bill will add up.
Hope that helps.



....and that's post 1,000 for me :D :cool:
 
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