Several years ago I successfully digitized some classical music reel-to-reels. That included having to 'bake' some of the tapes which suffered from the sticky shed phenomenon. Finding a working reel-to-reel player was tough but a radio station had superannuated several of them and I found one in good condition.
I did the same with a cassette deck.
Most of the time I took the analog output of the tape player and input it to a desktop computer with a sound card with stereo inputs. Older laptops often have an analog input, but the modern ones tend not to. I have an older laptop which does a good job.

When it came to LPs, my standard record deck required a pre-amplifier before it would 'match' to the computer analog inputs. Unfortunately it was hard to get a good signal from the pre-amp because of grounding issues. Ultimately I fed the record player output to a regular amplifier and took the signal from the headphone jack. The material I was converting was consumer grade to begin with and I got good quality music or audio out for my ear.

I originally used Cool Edit software. There was an affordable version until Adobe purchased it and made only the most expensive 'pro' version available. I have since used Audacity, which is less intuitive but not too bad.

I did not try to edit out clicks and record noises. I was willing to live with it back when and still now.