I have some demos from a UK band that have been transferred from cassette that I would like to make sound as good as possible. I'm not looking to perform any miracles but I would like to remove some of the tape hiss and possibly put some dynamic life back into the songs. I have Sonic Foundry available and a friend who has several Waves plugin sets so I can take the songs over to his place if necessary. I have uploaded two songs from two separate CD's. The first is probably from around 1989 or so and the second is probably late 90's. I would love to hear anyones ideas on how they would clean up these tracks or if someone is feeling generous they could give the cleanup a go and let me know what they found to be the best approach so that I can try to duplicate it on my own. The links for the songs in flac format are as follows:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=TZEEJW6O
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=CZN24LKA
I appreciate any advice anyone has to offer.

I can make some general recommendations. First, try to draw the music out with EQ rather than trying to squash the noise. You might also try rolling off the top end around 15-16k. Also, look for noise in the low midrange and upper bass. If you find one particularly annoying frequency a nice notch filter with a narrow Q can be very helpful.

If you decide to use noise reduction algorithms be sure to use something high quality like X-Noise. Use it only very sparingly if at all - it tends to introduce artifacts that are far worse than a little tape hiss.

Tape hiss can be markedly reduced without adding other noises or strangness, depending somewhat upon the audio, if the proper tools are used correctly. Someone speaking, no music, where there are thus many silent spaces between words, can perhaps be the most difficult.

My experiences are with CoolEdit and the SonicFoundry Noise Reduction 2 plugin, I don't know if comparable results can be obtainded with other software. I believe I have provided some extensive instructions for these two in earlier posts on NR.

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Gave it a number of pretty good shots using Audacity, but to no avail... The tape hiss remained enough to be annoying and the highs ended up too rolled off...

Andrew D.

Cdnav
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A multiband noise gate might be able to help, if you haven't tried that and can find one.

Try these: [1] [2]

I used the FFT noise filter of Audition for noise reduction. Select a part of the audio file containing noise and only noise (somewhat difficult with your samples ), usually in the beginning or end of the file and capture it as noise reduction profile (Effects, Restoration).
Next, select the entire file and apply noise reduction (Effects, Restoration). I used the default settings, I guess.

Edit: "Rain in Georgia" has pops in addition to noise, but I don't know how to remove those.

I like Audacity but it is far too limited for any "serious" audio processing. It's fun to dink around with and you might even learn a bit from it but you need real DAW software to get anything done.

As for the dropouts on "Rain in Georgia"...yeah, that's tough. I suppose you could try pasting audio from just before or after the drop (or perhaps from another channel. Making it believable would be another story entirely.