Hi. I need help to clean-up the audio on some compact cassettes.

Around 1992 I heard an ABC radio talk on Oral History Tapes, and the talk on this occasion was called "Bright Sparks" .
I enjoyed the talk and ordered the set of four audio tapes.
When they arrived they appeared to have been recorded on a recorder with dirty/fouled heads.
They were very difficult to listen to but the content was fascinating.

I have tried to obtain modern copies of the series on CD, but to no avail.

Is anyone able to run these tapes through an audio editor, clean them up, and burn the cleaned-up file to CD?

The tapes are on Early Radio and are titled.

1.The Wireless Priest.
2. Roll Your Own Radio.
3. Making Radio Pay.
4. Calling All Cars.

I would dearly like hear the tapes again. Unfortunately the people speaking sound like they are talking through a pillow.

Wayne

Are you sure the problem is not with the playback machine?

Good news.

I tried one of the tapes on another machine.
The result, while not excellent, was much better than that of the machine I used long ago.

I had cleaned the heads on the old machine and aligned them for best results. There was also no visible wear to the face of the heads.
That is why I thought that it was the tapes recordings that were bad.
I will however save the tapes to my computer, and try running them through Audacity.

Wayne.

If you have touched the head adjustments you will really need to re do it with an alignment test tape.

Wayne, I have a high-end Denon deck with only a few hours on it. You are welcome to use it if you like. It should be the best chance of getting the higher frequencies out of the noise if you are transcribing the tapes.

Hi Wayne, saw this thread and agree you can dredge clear sound from muck using one of the editing tools like audio lab or audacity.
Have a read of my "voices from the past" in the vintage gramophone forum.
I used audio lab to get listenable sound from unusable discs. You can crop, contour, clip and paste and edit out crashes, clicks, background and so on. I did not understand much of the software but just kept feeding audio into the sound card and then looking at it on the PC screen where you can "see" all the noise and then fiddled with the tools in audio lab to crop out the muck. Almost like using scissors and joining tape pieces and then running through an equalizer/compander but better.
Once you have a clean "recording" it will be in file format that you can then burn to disc and then playable on anything.
Cheers, Fred.