cassette conversion

I have a box of old cassettes in the attic (like a
million other blokes). Rather than consigning them
to the dust bin, I'd convert them to MP3 files. Anybody
have suggestions for a converter?

I could buy one blind, from Amazon or Best Buy, but
I wonder if there are differences in quality, among
competing models.

I plan to do one tape per day. It should require minimal
baby sitting - just start it, then let it run to completion,
and switch off, on its own.

PS Some of the tapes are metal, some CrO2, some plain
vanilla (whatever that means). And differing cutoff filters.
So that's a complication. As I recall, there were players which could recognize these various types. How did they do that?

--
Rich

 

[Richard Jones]

PS Some of the tapes are metal, some CrO2, some plain
vanilla (whatever that means). And differing cutoff filters.
So that's a complication. As I recall, there were players which could recognize these various types. How did they do that?

--
Rich

As I recall, there were cut-outs on the top edge of the cassette,
similar to the record protection notch.

 

[Charlie+]

On Tue, 21 Aug 2018 11:19:11 +0100, Richard Jones
<news@rgjones.screaming.net> wrote as underneath :

PS Some of the tapes are metal, some CrO2, some plain
vanilla (whatever that means). And differing cutoff filters.
So that's a complication. As I recall, there were players which could recognize these various types. How did they do that?

--
Rich

As I recall, there were cut-outs on the top edge of the cassette,
similar to the record protection notch.

I think the bigger thing to watch for - is were they originally recorded
with Dolby (usually B but possibly C on very high end recorders) or not.
Many later commercial tapes even used Dolby..
If your modern transfer player doesn't recognise Dolby encoding and
un-encode it, you would need to at least correct for hiss etc in the
MP3s. Depends on your perception! C+