Newest first. Tape numbers are the order they were captured in, not the order they were filmed, because the box was not sorted and neither am I.
Two separate recordings on one cassette with a stretch of blank tape between them. The deck resyncs badly across the join and drops about fifteen frames. Captured as one continuous stream rather than splitting it, and noted the offset in the sidecar file so future me does not think the file is corrupt.
White bloom along one edge of the pack, visible without opening the shell. I ran it anyway for thirty seconds to see, and it shed enough to need a head clean afterwards. Not worth a second attempt with the decks I have. Logged as unplayable and set aside rather than thrown out.
Straight digital transfer over FireWire, bit exact, no capture card in the path at all. Forty minutes start to finish including the checksum. Every time I do one of these I resent the analogue tapes slightly more.
Loud enough to hear from the next room, and my first assumption was that the binder was going. It was not the tape. A hardened pinch roller on the deck was slipping against the capstan. Twenty minutes with isopropyl on a lint-free cloth and the noise went away completely. The same tape now plays silently.
A good run, and it filled 260 GB. Lossless capture at this rate outgrows an SSD in about a month, so the working set moved to a pair of spinning disks with only the current month kept on fast storage. Should have started that way.
Repeated horizontal tears at the same points on every pass, which means they were recorded that way — probably a dirty head in the camcorder in 1997. Nothing to fix. Captured and moved on.
Labelled, dated, and completely empty. Ninety minutes of nothing. Kept the file anyway because the label is part of the record.