Don’t cheap it out.
Play the tape tape through a decent tape deck. Not a portable Walkman.
I ripped some of my old mixtapes via a portable and it sounded awful - highs were cut, wobbles, flutters etc
played it through the denon tape deck- sounded a lot better by 3x at least
So when you rip them - do play through a high quality deck into an audio interface usb FireWire whatever
I got a denon DRR6.5 and DRW 585 into an alesis io2 audio interface