Over To You: Tips For Digitising Old Mixtapes

It’s a very special “Over To You” today. Digital DJ Tips publisher and editor Phil Morse (that’s me) writes: “I have recently uncovered about 60 mixes on cassette tape that I made in the early-to-mid 90s, and I want to rip them to digital. As you’d guess the quality is pretty poor, but I have a hi-fi cassette deck I’ve borrowed from a friend, and I plan to rip them using Audacity and then normalise and de-hiss them. Finally, I think I’m going to post the to Mixcrate for posterity, because I can’t be bothered working out all the track lists to post them to Mixcloud!”

“I’m obviously only going to do this once, and so my question is: Anyone done this themselves and got any tips? Special post-recording filter or effect combinations that work well with dodgy old cassette rips? Any other tricks you think might help me? Obviously we can’t do anything about my ‘first few years’ mixing, but I’d like to do the rest as well as I can!”

So – over to you. If you can help me to make a better job of the task I’ve just set myself, I’d sure love to hear from you in the comments below! 🙂