I may not be able to afford doing anything about it immediately, but for future information…
Here’s the deal: I was digitizing some old home-recorded cassette tapes of me playing the piano, these being the only extant copies, and came to one tape which gave me problems. On rewind, it reached the end of the reel and kept going (the tape end detached from the little takeup reel). I disassembled and held my breath and managed to get it reattached with splicing tape, then reassembled mechanism and inserted into tape player. This time it snagged a bit of tape and got it all wound around the tape player innards (yes, I see you nodding, you remember that too. yes, I don’t have any fond memories of %^$#@!@ cassette tapes either). Tape snapped in the process of getting it out of the mechanism. Has crinkles and wrinkles and is stretched in some places. I took all that length (from where that mess started to the end I’d originally splice-taped onto the reel) and stuck it into a ziploc to think about later and attached end of reasonably intact tape to the reel instead and tried yet again. Doesn’t play well. Too much tension or it’s snagging or dragging somewhere.
So I’m in over my head. Ideally I’d like someone who is good at such things to take the tape length and insert it into new cassette-tape cage and play it to a digital recording, and also to splice the separate partially-mangled snippet into a longer reel of blank tape and play that also to digital recording, and give me the AIFFs, which I can then edit on the computer.
Where would I be likely to find that kind of service? What would such a service bill itself as? And, umm, what would the bill be likely to come to, speaking of bills?