Adobe Audition is awesome for this. I work as a producer and I have cleaned the WORST audio you've ever heard.
It's in the $700 range now. Get a fully functional 30 day trial here.
http://www.adobe.com/products/tryadobe/main.jsp#product=92
Go to EFFECTS... NOISE REDUCTION.... then you capure a noise profile on a part of the audio that contains only the tape hiss, then select the whole file and apply the effect to the whole file.
For speeding up or slowing down audio, go to EFFECTS... TIME STRETCH... you'll find you can speed up the file by time or speed percentage.
It really is amazing.
Hope this helps.
> Eric,
>
> I can't answer the inexpensive question, but since no one
> answered you, I'll tell you what I use. I use Cool Edit
> 2000. Most of the time though, I will leave an aircheck
> with tape hiss alone because, as you said, the high end gets
> cut off. You can select how much noise reduction, so you
> can get a compromise when you have a severely hissy
> aircheck. BUT - there are a lot of controls with CE2k and
> they can take some time to master. In theory, you could
> eliminate just the frequency of the hiss and let everything
> else pass through.
>
> As for speeding up an aircheck, I used this same program to
> time compress an aircheck where the female jock sounded
> male. OK, her voice is deep to begin with, but... well, it
> wasn't right.
>
> Cool Edit USED to be inexpensive... it went for $69. Then
> Adobe bought them and changed it's name to Auditon. Haven't
> looked in a while, but they priced it outside the range of
> most home users.
>
> If you find anything, let us know. I'm curious.
>
> John
>
