Cassette tape cleaning?

**lynchmob** · August 11th, 2002, 09:02 AM

I found a bunch of old music cassettes I had assumed were lost.Some play fine, some needed to be put in new cassette housing,but some are sounding muffled.Is it possible to clean the magnetic tape to make them sound better?A lot of these are not available on cd or p2p.
lynch

**nomaxim** · August 11th, 2002, 01:14 PM

Not aware of a way to fix the tape.

Had same problem, simply put the tape has degraded, that is what causes the muffled sound. 15-20 yrs. max life of the tape.

What I ended up doing was giving them to a friend that was able remix them. You can get software to do this but its $2-300
at least. Do you know any DJ's? Is so ask them.

**crazyray** · August 11th, 2002, 01:36 PM

A couple of things can make tapes sound muffled.

*Exposure to magnetic fields (vacuum cleaner, etc)
*Worn out
*Poor azimuth alignment. The tape will sound best on the machine it was recorded on. Physical misalignment will roll off the high frequencies.
*Dirty head on the playback machine.

**lynchmob** · August 11th, 2002, 04:41 PM

These are some pretty old tapes.so I'm not holding my hopes up too high

lynch

shahani · August 11th, 2002, 04:44 PM

I don't think you can fix them, especially if they have not been rewound for long. The magnetism leaves a distortion. To preserve tapes, even if you don't play them often is to rewind them once in 2-3 months.

If the content is what you are after, you could probably try Kazaa. I found a lot of old music that way. Or do a google on the artist/title.

**UUoodseifer** · August 16th, 2002, 10:08 PM

My dad said Alcohol or breath freshener on the heads does the trick

but please dont quote me on this....

**Cruez** · August 16th, 2002, 10:23 PM

One thing I have found is that the little pad under the tape will cause the muffled sound.....they tend to fall off...

**Brainchild** · August 17th, 2002, 01:05 AM

Try This Software the lite version is free, and I used it to remix some old club tapes I had. It has EQ, and some enhancments included. It's good software.

Good Luck

**lynchmob** · August 17th, 2002, 04:41 AM

Thanks for the tips and ideas,everybody

I have nothing to lose with the alcohol trick,and the tapes I put in new housings still sound muffled so I guess its not the felt pad underneath.
I'm gonna check that proggy out,bc.
I am also gonna try to use gramofile(linux) which has some noise filters.I've used it with good tapes I wanted transfered to cd-r and it's a nice little CLI utility.
lynch