It almost makes me want to chew nails!
I have an irreplaceable audio cassette–irreplaceable because it includes material I recorded off radio in 1979.
The problem is that for about 8 inches at one end–which broke loose from the leader tape–the magnetic tape is curled–lengthwise.
What do I do about this? Is there any way to uncurl the tape?
Foretunately only this 8-inch length is affected…
Could you describe it in a little more detail? Are we talking casette or reel to reel? How do you think this might have come about?
Do you mean curled in the sense that if I were to look down it lengthwise from the top the edges would be upturned like a letter ‘U’? If that’s the case it was probably warped by friction heat from a stuck positioning roller or maybe the head and might be fixed simply by winding it in the otther direction and leaving it sit.
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Could you describe it in a little more detail? Are we talking cassette or reel to reel? How do you think this might have come about?
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It’s an ordinary audio cassette; the brand was Tracs 90, bought in fall 1978 and finally recorded as it is now in July 1979. (Long story, involving an unsuccessful effort to record six LPs on two 90-minute cassettes.) The tape had actually been a little twisted, if that’s the word, for a while; only last week did I find it curled this way.
You’re right, that’s how it would look longitudinally. I’ll try winding it that way on the take-up hub and leave it that way for a few days…any suggestions on avoiding temprerature? (Although I’m not going to bring strong heat or cold near it.)
Thanx 
Seeing as how it’s just a run-of-the-mill cassette tape I’m sure it was either warped by the friction of the rubber positioning wheel against the tape head or just a case of a twenty-plus year old cassette tape being fragile enough to be warped by the stress of being re-wound.
In either case I think its probably a loss.
1979? Can’t you just get a copy of Frampton Comes Alive on CD?
No matter what you wind up doing for the curl, you should think about copying it to a new tape before all the oxide flakes off and you wind up with crackling, hissing, and other garbage.
Peter Frampton? I’m not a rock fan, Inky. I was a teenager during the Beatle era; I have only 3 CDs all told, and one is of the Beach Boys.
The stuff I recorded off radio was from a “beautiful” music station, KBIG-FM. (The other CDs I have are Jonathan & Darlene Edwards and Les Paul & Mary Ford.) All right, so I may be the quintessential square.
I assume that the rest of the tape is okay?
Go ask any technology savvy fifteen-year-old you know to transfer it into their/your computer in .WAV format and then burn it to a CD. Chances are the tape is losing both it’s elasticity and it’s magnetic profile.
Nothing wrong with Les Paul!
Thanks, Inky. I may advertise on Yahoo for this: I don’t know too may 15-year-olds. (I’m 51.)
Les Paul & Mary Ford are old favorites. (I know she has passed on 
; whether he is still alive I have no idea.)
Option one
Take the tape apart, cut off the duff end put a minute dab of superglue on it and fiX to the leader by overlapping quarter inch.
Option two
Carry out option one and transfer the recording to a cassette in better condition
Option three
Carry out option one and then put it on a recordable CD, you can tweak it to improve the sound quality if you have the right software.
The damaged part can be recovered but it means cutting it off and feeding it through the tape heads manually and I can testify that this is one bitch. I had to take the casing off my tape player to gain enough access to be able to do it and then I had to record it to another tape, finally mixing that section into a recording of the rest of the tape.Getting all the levels right was very hard but trying to get the timing something like took me a whole day.
I was shown a way of doing this by swapping connections around on the tape heads and running the tape backwards but you really have to love that tape and know plenty about tape recorder repair and maintenance to do it. I do and it still looked a complete f**k about.
That’s what I did: I dubbed the intact part onto a new cassette, leaving blank space for the band that was damaged, and re-recorded the band, which was “Skin” on Allan Sherman’s 1964 album Allan in Wonderland. (The title is a pun on “Heart,” written by Harold Arlen from Damn Yankees.) It’s just fine now. Thanx.