Ancient voice tapes to digital: Quality options advice?

[semiclue]

I have a ton of old cassette tapes of conversations and parties that I want to make MP3s of before they bite it, just for nostalgia. The original quality is amateur and crummy, and some are beat up and decades old. But I'm not looking to tweak the sound now, only to create a digital set that retains all existing audio data and volume. (When I say "retains all," I don't mean to the extent of saving in a big lossless format. However I'll be using Audacity, and will also keep the raw .aup versions of a few in case I do want to tweak someday.)

Q1: I'm thinking recording in 32kbps, 44 khz mono will be more than enough to duplicate the existing quality? Those parameters even sound ok to me on other talk recordings like podcasts. And I'm guessing anything higher/better would just be a waste of space in this case.

Q2: If I do make mono recordings, would using my laptop's internal microphone jack (with a standard 3.5mm audio cable) be just as good as using the stereo line-in jack on my desktop PC? If it doesn't matter, the laptop would be a lot more convenient.

I made a couple test recordings the above way and I *think* they sound the same as the originals… However I didn't and would rather not take the time to do more extensive comparison tests, e.g. also making stereo versions and versions of higher quality; moving them around to listen on good audio equipment; etc. I'm assuming that given the crappy mono originals, it 'couldn't' really matter -- that later special effects tweaking could of course, but not the capture part (beyond 32kbps, anyway).

Thanks much for any guidance!

[RealBlackStuff]

Look at Magix's Audio Cleaning Lab. Cheap and cheerful! Even older versions from 10 and 11 onwards perform wonders!
http://www.magix.com/us/audio-cleaning- ... nerid=9015

[semiclue]

Long story short, for peace of mind I decided to also save a WAV set after all. (And -- even tho I'll be recording in mono intentionally -- to use desktop line-in rather than laptop microphone input, due to some microphone "pre-amping" thing I read about.) So that should suffice for the capture part, and preserve all my options. But if I do want to tweak and improve the files someday I'll look into the app you suggested, thanks! I'm only familiar with a few basic filters so that would be more appealing than having to study up on a bunch of additional ones.