About twenty years ago I executed a project to take my family's old reel-to-reel music tapes and convert them to digital. I had contacts at the local radio station who loaned me a reel recorder. I used its headphone jack to get a stereo signal out, which could be adjusted in the correct voltage range to be fed into my computer's line-in micro jack. The music tapes were all at the time at least forty years since purchase, once 'high quality' audio, but were found to be of varied physical quality. The DECCA label tapes could could be spooled up and played as if no time had passed. The London ffrr tapes, mostly D'Oyly Carte Gilbert & Sullivan production were quite delicate and appeared to be symptomatic of the sticky-shed phenomena. After reading up on this on the internet I baked the tapes in my electric oven at low temperature for 12-24 hours. Then processed the tapes as with the others. This was all done with minimal hardware, most of it found around the house. My relatives were satisfied with the results.

One of the lessons I drew from this was that good magnetic media well handled was at least as reliable as standard CD storage.

Good luck.