Hey, I’ve wrestled with DAT ghosts before. First, grab a good digitizer and pull the tape at a low speed—44.1k or 48k is fine—then dump it into a DAW with a buffer big enough to avoid dropouts. Once you’ve got the raw wave, load it into a spectral editor like iZotope RX or the free spectral view in Audacity. Use the “Spectral Repair” or “Auto Heal” to wipe out the obvious hiss and click spikes, then manually brush the worst spots. If the tape is really corrupted, you might need to use a dual‑read approach: read the same tape section twice at different speeds, cross‑check the clean chunks, and splice them together. If that still leaves a wall of noise, consider using a phase‑inversion trick to cancel the steady hiss, or just turn the glitch into a creative sample. Once you’ve got a decent slice, you can layer it with fresh synths or re‑record the lost parts if you can locate the original studio. Let me know what you pull out and we can fine‑tune it together.

Gotcha, that basement DAT hunt always feels like chasing a ghost. The one that keeps tripping me up is an old jazz session from the '70s—its DAT burned so badly that every track is a patchwork of hiss, clicks, and a faint hiss that sneaks through even after spectral clean‑ups. I keep one copy on a 32‑bit float file just in case. If you dig that one, give me a shout and we’ll turn its eerie noise into something that actually plays in the mix. Good luck, and keep those ears peeled for that elusive hiss.