Yeah, just don't wipe the cassettes down with a light cloth. Ain't gonna' do any good for you.

When I rip cassettes, I run the signal through my stereo amp and let that shape the sound how I want it. Yeah, then dump the entire tape to one wave file. I'll break out the individual tracks by hand later with CoolEdit (96, because it rocks over 2000). Then encode with your enc of choice.