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That's what I was thinking as well; I wonder if it would be as simple as recording all of them, aligning them in Audacity and playing back the resultant mix? Any dropouts on one tape would be largely overruled by the (strong) signal from all the good tapes?

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Aligning them is non-trivial because of "wow and flutter" caused by variation of the tape speed. Even if your tape player has perfectly stable tape speed the original recorder wouldn't have had it. Maybe you could calculate some inverse-wow-and-flutter distortion that minimizes the difference between the tracks.

Just have each tape owner read it to the best ability of their drive, and then compare the results centrally: for each byte, take that which occurs in the most results. I would assume that where tapes fail, they all fail differently.

And that should also work for floppy disks, right?

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