...in upcoming weeks.  It's my old band and we've just located these old reel-to-reels we made back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
 
I haven't heard them yet, but wondered what challenges I'm going to have.  I suspect I'll be able to hook up an old RtoR machine up to my audio interface and simply import, in real time, to SONAR, do some fiddling (not high quality mixed in the first place), and export eventually as MP3.
 
Any of you done this before and have any advice?  Thanks in advance!

You may  (I can almost guarantee it)  have problems with the magnetic oxide particles coming off while you are in play mode and the tape passes through the transport.  The glue that holds the magnetic particles to the base backing breaks down over time.  You may only get a few minutes in before you will have to stop and clean the tape path.  Then again I have seen some tapes that hold up super well and don't shed at all.  You won’t know until you try it.  I usually wind the tape to the end and rewind back as well before doing a transfer.  The tape may be stuck together a bit.
 
Now if you are having oxide issues you can get the tapes baked in a special oven.  Do not use a normal oven it is way too hot.  The tape baking oven needs to be around 130F or 55C.  I have built a special oven for the purpose.  I do transfers professionally for people.  There may be a facility in your city that offers the service.  The tape needs to be wound onto a metal spool and then the sides of the spool removed so it is only a pancake you are baking.  (Don't drop the pancake either!)
 
You will get 3 to 4 passes with no oxide coming off after baking then it goes back to where it was before so you have to capture quickly.  Baking takes around 8 hours usually.
 
The tape machine should preferably be the same track format and speed as the recording and obviously the better the machine the better the result you will get.
 
You need to set levels and make sure the loudest passages don't clip your system.
 
If you are having issues you can always send the reels to me.  I have 6 tape machines here that cover every format and speed pretty well and also the baking oven of course.
 
Good luck.

I did it.
It's a lot of fun.
Save the raw tracks somewhere safe before you tweak.

Jeff is spot on.  I have some old tapes from that era that are just almost useless, but I keep them anyway for some reason.  Some tapes are fine but the Quantagy tape was the worst for lifespan.  I'm talking 1/4" half track format at 15 ips.

bitman made a good point too.  On the way into your DAW no processing or anything. Just capture as they are. All processing should be done post capture.
 
mixmkr if you want to send me the reel I would be happy to have a go at it for you. The baking does not hurt the tape either.  The worst that can happen is that it will still shed after baking.  What you think is useless now can turn into a totally playable tape for one or two passes after baking on the other hand.

I am glad Jeff chimed in off the bat. Shedding is destructive so without baking you may get only one pass on the tape. Depending on storage conditions you may not even get that. Please consider his advice on baking these first.

I just did this with about 10 1/4" reels of my grandfather playing guitar/singing. The newest tape was pre 1977. I didn't bake these tapes. They were in terrible condition. Very brittle. I assumed I would only get one play out of them. Now that I've done it, I probably could have gotten more than one play. 
 
I wound each tape to an empty reel and then rewound them back before I played them.
 
Other than the occasional tape snapping, it was fairly uneventful. 
 
I did have to clean the machine after every tape. 
 
 
 
https://soundcloud.com/the-grandpa-tapes

We digitize thousands of tapes for over ten years for numerous clients. We earn our daily bread.
We think Sonar is the best Software to this Job.
The tapes lost some heights. So take an Equalizer.
ZNoise (Waves) and RX4 (iZotope) is the best way to restaure the tapes from noise.
Even tapes from 1960 will sound well.

Thanks a lot, guys.  I will definitely do the baking.
 
I would go with you, Jeff, but you're in Australia.  I'm in the States.  THambrecht is in Germany.
 
Mettelus, I spend half of my time in Northern Virginia.  Are you in the business, or can you tell me where to get this done?

Unfortunately, no, but I have seen this topic come up off and on. The last one had several folks pop in to recommend folks (that one was for a person who had 2" tape with no machine to play it on, IIRC). If you preface a Google search with "site:forum.cakewalk.com" it will target keywords for this forum only, which may help. Another option would be to rename this thread or start a new one.
 
As Jeff mentioned, you may also want to simply search for businesses local to you which do this. Do you have the RtoR to play them back on? As mentioned above, some do the "entire service" end-to-end, but definitely research them.