With each successive generation of technology, we collectively make each leap faster and with slightly less pain. However, as a music fanatic, the jump from tape to CD/mp3 was a tough one for me. Enter the Plusdeck2 Tape-RW PC Cassette Deck. This fantastic device, supplied by geeks.com, has been one of the best devices I’ve had the pleasure of reviewing. Read on for the complete story.
There is no doubt, the Plusdeck2 is not for everyone. It’s an expensive device if you goal is simply to convert a few cassettes. However, if you have music that can’t be easily made digital – such as recordings of live music with no digital source, tapes of music that hasn’t been released on CD, or (especially) cassette tapes of your own bands or music that were recorded onto cassette, this device is perfect. In my case, I had well over 200 tapes that I would like to convert to both WAV and mp3.
The Plusdeck2 fits directly into any standard 5¼” bay on your computer. Although it looks like it it might run via IDE, it does not – rather it has a a 20-pin cable that connects to a daughter board that rests in the back of your PC. The daughter board doesn’t actually use a PCI connection, just the expansion slot on your case. The daughter board, in turn, connects to your soundcard, either via two cables for 2 channel cards or via 3 or 4 for your Dolby Digital cards. In my case, I have a Soundblaster card capable of 5.1 sound. Finally, you’ll need to connect the daughter board to a serial port on your computer. This controls the device via the software.
Installation took about 15 minutes. The first, and largest complaint I have about the Plusdeck2 is the instruction manual. While it’s really not very tough to hook up to anyone with much PC experience, the device appears to be very complex for someone who hasn’t toyed with computer cabling before. Determining which cables are connected to which slots is a task, as there are several possible configurations and getting it right may initially take some tinkering to find the right combination.
That said, the requirements for the Plusdeck2 are very minimal:
- Available 5.25″ External Drive Bay
- Available Expansion Slot (for connection card)
- Sound Card (analog Line out, Line in essential)
- Windows 98 and above
Once you have the device connected, you’ll need to install the companion software. The software installs quickly and easily into Microsoft Windows and does not require a reboot. Seconds later, you should find yourself able to listen to cassettes through your computer; all controls are present in the software. While the interface is minimal and arguably not the most attractive, it’s extremely simple to use and very concise, both positives in my book. There are no unnecessary options, and it was straightforward enough that I didn’t need the instructions to begin encoding in seconds.
I immediately wanted to test conversion with no further manual reading. I popped in an old cassette tape – a fairly common Maxell XL-II type II chromium dioxide cassette from about 1993. The controls allow you to choose from several possible destination audio formats. Amongst them, you’ll find WAV and mp3 at several bitrates ranging from 8 through 256. I converted the first song to WAV format, which is the general standard lossless format.
Audio CDs use a “format” called PCM, and WAV is Microsoft’s digital representation of that. Because of Windows’ prevalence, WAV was adopted nearly universally as the standard representation of CD audio. Therefore, it is very easy, on all platforms, to create audio CDs from WAV files without losing any data or performing any major format conversion. Read more at Wikipedia.
Conversion from tape to digital file is a snap. A single mouse-click lets you convert either side A, side B, both as a single file, or both as individual files. Recording to disk occurs in real time and you can listen to the content as it plays. You will want to note that the unit is suceptible to interference, so you’ll want to keep additional noise, rattling, and computer movement to a minimum while recording. The result of conversion one were fantastic, the WAV file sounds incredible. Of course, the condition of your tape is paramount to a successful conversion.
For my second conversion, I selected 192 kpbs mp3. Again, in one mouse-click, I was able to convert the second song. When you record to mp3, it’s interesting to see that the unit actually records a WAV file, and then encodes it once the recording is completed. Therefore, you’ll want to make sure you have about 500MB available in addition to the space needed for the your mp3 if you are converting the first side of a 90-minute cassette. You’ll get a nice warning box that pops up confirming that your mp3s have been created when the encoding is done. The mp3 quality is really nice. Unfortunately, when creating mp3s, the ID3 tags are left blank, which is really not a big deal, since there’s no prepopulated information and certainly nothing like CDDB to use for this operation.
One feature the Plusdeck2 touts is the ability to recognize blank space in a playing tape and automagically break a long track into individual songs. It does this by searching for distinct breaks in the recording that tape decks create during recording. As a devout Phish fan, I have well over 100 live tapes, whose contents usually play without interuption for the duration of a side. These tapes have no track gaps, and as such, this feature doesn’t work. I found it to be a bit scary to use this feature, as some tapes have these gaps even though you don’t want them there. My experience with this feature was make or break – it did a reasonably good job at determining track breaks, however, it often inserted a two silent second track between my songs, and it sometimes clipped the beginning of the song just enough to be annoying. These breaks leave you with no recourse but to use an external program to rejoin your tracks if they are incorrectly split, or to re-encode if cut. I generally found that listening to tapes as I created them was easier and more fun, although my alternate method was also suitable.
The “alternate” method I chose was a much easier overall process. I began by encoding each side of a tape in its entirety to WAV. Then, I imported the WAV file into Audacity, the excellent open source audio editor. From there, I simply highlighted each track – track divisions are generally simple to see – and chose “File > Export Selection As WAV.” When I wanted or needed an mp3, I’d simply export the same selection as an mp3 as well (don’t forget, if you’re using Audacity, you’ll need an mp3 encoder, such as LAME). This made it very easy to encode a number of tapes to WAV and then split them at my convenience.
Although seemingly trivial, one of the disappointments with the Plusdeck2 is the front bezel. Sporting a part-indigo/part-beige bezel, I’m sure it stands out nicely in a whitebox machine that in which many of these units will doubtlessly end up. However, in my machine, which is black through and through, it sticks out like a sore thumb, and it’s tacky looking to boot. However, in fairness, it’s a small price to pay for the usefulness of the unit.
The Plusdeck2 includes the ability to push your WAV and mp3 files onto a tape. Although I can imagine this may be useful for some, I can’t think of any reason I’d want to do this, so I didn’t test this functionality.
Now, of course, there will be those users who ask why one would buy a unit like this when you could easily plug your tape deck into the “Line In” of your soundcard and use an application like Audacity to manually import. There’s no good reason not to do just that. If that’s your preference, it’s certainly a lot less expensive than purchasing the Plusdeck2. However, having done that many times before, there’s no question that it’s certainly many times faster to use the Plusdeck2. The quality is generally nowhere near what I received from the Plusdeck2, and nowhere near as consistent. In addition, it’s much simpler, and if your tape deck isn’t near your computer, it’s also much less of a mess because there are fewer cables. In my mind, the Plusdeck is worth every penny. It’s not much different than most debates we see here on OSNews – ultimately, you’re paying for the polish, ease of use, hassle-free experience.
Overall, the Plusdeck2 is clearly not targetted at all PC users. However, for those who have extensive collections of irreplaceable music cassettes, large numbers of books on tape, recorded lectures, or other cassettes, the Plusdeck2 is a fantastic addition. My experience with the Plusdeck2 was so positive and I’ve so seamlessly integrated into my routine that I am highly recommending it to all readers with cassettes they still use or wish they could still use.
Pros
· Simple to install
· Easy to use
· Application is drop dead simple
· Saves tons of time
· Adds functionality without using space on IDE chain
· Reasonably priced
Cons
· Cabling section of instruction manual is confusing
· Same function can be had for free with some work and some cables
· Bezel doesn’t offer choice of color
· Application doesn’t support ID3 tags
Overall Rating: 9/10. An excellent piece of equipment.
Before anyone starts the never-ending debate on why this “gadget” is featured on OSNews, let me clarify and repeat that we are a general technology site, and although we primarily focus on Operating Systems, we are not limited to only them.
Nothing you can’t do with a cassette deck, sound card and audio leads, but I imagine it would be quite nice if you’re still into tapes.
Yay, more geeks.com spam, please give us some more camera’s and other hardware on an OS portal
Using a Audigy 2 with a HQ cassette deck would have much higher quality than this….IMHO.
I’m still looking for an internal MiniDisk drive, preferably with HiMD support, for the same reasons you wanted a tape deck. However, these internal MD drives are hard to find, and I’m quite sure that there’s no HiMD version yet.
Overall, a cool thing, even though I have no use for it.
And this has WHAT to do with Operating Systems?
Sigh. OSNews.com posts another affiliate commission shill.
I for one appreciate learning about this product.
I’ve gone the stereo to PC route and it was a pain in the butt, taking up too much space and requiring me to change my PC sound settings (before and then after each taping session).
We play audio books to our children each night from the family PC adjacent to their bedroom and we’ve about maxed out the local library systems in terms of CD Audiobooks. However they have much larger numbers of cassette audiobooks just waiting for us to figure out a way to use them.
A product like the one mentioned here may be in my future and help save me time, money and technical frustration.
Also, I think I see a KDE-based desktop in my future (just trying to drive up the number of comments on this article 😉 )
Actually, WAV’s prevalence might not stem from it being a MS format: as the Wikipedia correctly points out, the RIFF format (that WAV belongs to) is “a clone of Electronic Arts’s Interchange File Format, introducted in 1985, the only difference being that multi-byte integers are in little-endian format”. Since IFF files were used on both Amigas and Macs, the support for RIFF was pretty easy to implement.
I’ve found that WAVs, raw WAVs at least, are functionally identical to AIFFs. E.g., I’ve had (IIRC) older versions of CDex that wouldn’t recognize/convert AIFF files, but I just used a CMD prompt to change their extension to .wav and it worked fine.
As far as I can tell, raw audio is pretty much just raw audio.
This product is way more expensive on Amazon.com ($150 vs $90 at geeks.com).
Bummer that it reads at regular tape speed.
Can rip an entire tape as one track, or split into tracks based on sound gaps in tape.
Mounted internal to the computer — I would have preferred a standalone unit myself.
> Bummer that it reads at regular tape speed.
I think the risks connected with reading at higher speeds would be way too high…
Thom, an internal HiMD drive would ROCK! dang. i loved my minidisc player/recorder… HiMD data would be cool, as well as recording voice etc..
i remember sony had for a very short period, md data drives in a few PC’s they shipped.. never seen once sice…
HiMD data would be cool, as well as recording voice etc..
MiniDisc is for me the one true portable music format. I just upgraded from a standard MDLP recorder to HiMD, and it is awesome… 1GB on one HiMD disc, just awesome. Oh, and you *can* store data on those HiMD discs, and your old normal MDs too, they get formatted as HiMD to store ~300mb of data. The portable recorder will be recognized as a standard USB mass storage device; mine works fine in Linux and OSX. The latest HiMD recorders can play MP3 too; so you’re not stuck on ATRAC anymore (but true MD zealots like me will still prefer ATRAC
).
And yes, a year after MD Audio got introduced (1992), Sony introduced MD-Data, but it was shortlived, and incompatible with MD-Audio.
I kid you not, I had the idea for just such a thing back in 1997.
I shared this idea with my friends and they all looked at me funny. That “o-kayyy” type look. The idea spawned from actually having stuff on casette I wanted to encode to MP3 but didn’t feel that I should have to hookup a whole stereo to my pc to do it.
Then a few months ago, I stumble across one of these on ThinkGeek and near had a fit.
If only I had put out a patent on the idea
Since we are discussing tape/Mp3 can anyone tell me whether tape quality is superior to mp3 ? Or does it just have that “old charm” factor with it?
It’s not really a valid comparison – one is a recording media, the other is compression format. Tape converted to WAV will typically not sound better than an MP3 ripped from a CD though. IME, I’ve found that vinyl converted to digital audio sounds a hell of a lot better than cassette converted to digital audio.
Older people laugh at my unfamiliarity with analog audio equipment, I’m sure. I had to ask someone if you’re supposed to be able to hear sound from a record player when there aren’t any speakers attached to it.
there is nothing in this review that analyzes the sound quality of this device. how much noise is added by this device into the sound file? how does this compare with connecting a high-quality tape deck to a sound card’s line in jack? if you couple this device with a professional sound card, does the sound quality improve significantly?
$130 seems like a high premium to pay when all the users would already have a tape deck and a sound card. why pay $130 when you could just use a cable to connect the tape deck you already have?
All one has to do instead is use an old walkman, a cable from radio shack to go from the headphone jack to your sound cards line in and Audacity.
If you want even more features like autodetection of tracks you can get Steinberg Clean.
Wouldn’t an USB connection make sense for a device like this? I guess converting old tapes to digital formats isn’t exactly something most people do every day, so it doesn’t really make sense to me that it requires a 5¼” bay and an expansion slot. Better to put it somewhere else and connect it when needed.
But I guess you will have a lot of tapes to convert to justify the price of this thing if you allready have a good tape deck.
Hmm, I remember reading about a similar device for converting vinyls. That was many years ago. Are there any today?
I think it’s not so bad.A friend of mine has a about 200 cassettes from the old days.He would never unplug his nakamichi casette player and connect the device to the PC.This PlusDeck could make a difference for him.Once the songs are digitalized all expensive soundcards are pretty useless because he could remaster all his songs quite easily and play them on his Mark Levinson (SACD player).
yes, it would make more sense to do this over usb, or maybe firewire.
and thats the reason why you dont see internal data drives for the himd format. every himd player out there can act as a usb storage media unit, just like say an external hardrive.
just pop in the disc, plug in the player and presto, drag the files onto the new removable media icon that showed up. i have even read a story over on forums.minidisc.org from someone that booted a mac using their himd player.
only problem is that the write speed of the media is so slow that you get no benifit from using anything above usb1.
but as the media is magnetoptical (look it up over on tomshardware.com) its more or less indestructable. MO is viewed as a replacement for the good old backup tape.
allso, its fully RW, unlike most RW cds that can only be fully erased. you cant realy delete a file in the middle of the cd to reclaim space. a himd disc or a himd formated md behaves just like a fat partition. a slow fat partition but still
so dont hang around waiting for sony or similar to make a internal himd drive. grab one now as they are selling them cheap these days. maybe it will even indicate to sony that the format is still worth supporting as they may well axe it soon to help streamline their portfolio of products.
or maybe pray that some other company picks up a licence from sony and keeps it alive.
I fairly regularly convert old cassettes/vinyl to CD for an old guy around here. I’m actually doing it at the moment with the method described in the article (headphone extension cord from the line out of my soundcard to the headphone/speaker out jack(s) of a tape deck/record player). The main thing that sounded interesting in the review was the ability to automagically find track end/start times, a shame that it doesn’t work reliably.
You’re definitely right about the convenience. Having software controls for the tape deck – and not having to run back and forth between two rooms when starting a recording – would sure be nice. Also nice for people who don’t already have/don’t want to buy a handful of adapters/cables from RadioShack.
The ability to push MP3s/WAVs to tape sounds cool too. Sounds like a handy way to make mixed tapes for people who still have car tapedecks or are analog devotees like my roommate.
Does it have any features for automatically adjusting the recording levels, or do you still have to do that manually through Windows? Most of the tapes I convert are mixed tapes with typically inconsistent levels, so I often have to go back and re-record a side because one loud song caused peaking.
Is there any chance you could post a sample of a track recording using the Plusdeck and a sample recorded just through the line in? My uncle just mailed me a shoebox full of old cassettes and the $130USD would probably be worth it IMO if there’s that significant of a difference in sound.
but not others. Those who don’t have the heart to throw out the old tapes usually have a deck or 2 around, and a quality component deck is relatively cheap.
I use the Steinberg Clean mentioned above that has a Lite version of WavLab included. For hardware I use a component deck an Audigy 2. I have a turntable going into a decent xformer which came with Clean.
Quality of tapes vs MP3. Argument is sort of irrelevant. But to answer, I would say “that depends.” An MP3 recorded at a VBR high is better quality than a used tape. Since most audiophiles used vinyl instead of tape, it’s not really an audiophile question. Tapes were more for those too young to care or afford and wanted something to play in the car.
The big reason to keep them was never quality. It’s usually that a CD version didn’t exist for a long time or the LPs weren’t filtering through used channels. Or sometimes tapes have tracks (or versions) not available to LP or CD – as in the Cure’s “Carnage Visors” on the B side to “Faith.”
I’d say tapes and mp3s fill the same respective role, and quality is always a secondary concern to convenience. Even using -alt preset insane. If you really cared about quality, MP3 isn’t what you’d use. Tape was never meant to replace LPs. They were convenient and portable. There were other formats that came along (DAT, minidisc), but they never took off. MP3 may not be as high a quality as Ogg, FLAC, AAC, WMA, etc but it is much more convenient and it is “good enough.” You put your LPs on tape to make them more convenient; you put your CDs on MP3 to make them more convenient.
It would be great if old tapes could be used as digital (something like Sony Digital-8).
Anyone knows old streamers that used compact cassette-like tapes ? (TEAC, if i remember well…)
also, to clarify, an MP3 from a CD will usually sound better than a tape of the same song. An MP3 from a tape may actually sound better since you can process out some of the garbage (hum, warble, noise).
BeDoper – I think having a dual-deck component may be still be better. I have all of the functionality (record from/ to) using the deck with Steinberg Clean. It’s tracking splitting is decent, but better than most. I also manually adjust levels though, so an app that performed that would be ideal.
Clean also comes with a Preamp for connecting your turntable into it, if you have components.
BeDoper – I think having a dual-deck component may be still be better. I have all of the functionality (record from/ to) using the deck with Steinberg Clean.
Does Clean have any special ability to push out to tape, or do you use the “run a cable from the soundcard line out to the tapedeck’s mic/input” method?
I’d imagine you’d certainly get more flexibility from your setup. In my case though, I have the computer in one room, and the tape deck in another (part of a stero, can’t really move it) and the swapping of cables gets a bit tedious when I’m doing it a lot.
It’s tracking splitting is decent, but better than most.
Is it any more elegant than doing “Export selection as AIFF” in Audacity? I’d ideally like something that allowed you to select the start/end times of all tracks in a file, then be able to perform the “cut” operation once, saving the tracks as sequentially-named files.
Sorry, but to it looks rather bad. A Nakamichi owner will not be happy with a tapemachine that doesn’t even know the difference between normal, chrome or metal tapes. And what about dolby? I have some 200+ tapes recorded with dolby-c, mostly chrometapes. Problem is that in all those years, the paybacklevel has dropped, so playback with dolby is terrible, and playback without dolby is terrible, too. What I need is a way to adjust the playbacklevel before the signal goes into the dolby-chips. In theory, this could be done in software, but I didn’t find a software dolby-C decoder, so I’m afraid that I have to take my soldring iron, and put some pre-amp/equaliser between the playback-head and the dolby chips…..
$10 Cassette Walkman from Walmart and a stero cable to plug from the cassette head phone jack to the input line in jack on the sound card. Total cost? $12 including tax.
Using your favorite recorder of choice from Audacity to Windows Record; push play on the tape and hit the record button.
Jim
You don’t know what you’re talking about. Windows “Record” – the Windows ssound recorder can only do 60 seconds of recording. To trick it, you must do something like repeat your own sound over and over again and then record over it. Since you didn’t mention this time consuming effort, it’s clear you’re never done it, and even though I hate the word, you’re obviously “trolling.”
I can’t believe how many people decided to chime in to address something I discussed and addressed in the article, which I suspect most of them didn’t read in the first place. It’s awfully sad.
# Seperation: 40dB
# Signal toNoise Ratio: 55dB
For $130? Without Dolby decoding and at least 70 dB Signal to Noise, I don’t think so. I agree with the others here, walkman with a line-out jack would be just as useful and sound just as good. I might pay $50 or $60 just for the novelty, but not $130. You’re better of spending that money on a nicer soundcard, like an Audigy platinum or Terratec Aureon.
Since you didn’t mention this time consuming effort, it’s clear you’re never done it, and even though I hate the word, you’re obviously “trolling.”
How is he trolling? He also mentioned Audacity, which would work just fine. Just because someone has their own opinion and doesn’t agree with your precious article is no reason to start crying and call them a troll. All he said was that he thought this was too expensive and the same (or better) can be done with a portable tape player and a program to record from it. You on the other hand start personally attacking him, and that’s sad. For what it’s worth I agree with him; this is an overpriced gimmick. I’d rather buy a high quality tape deck and hook it into my sound card.
I think I’ll wait for the 8-track version.
Hi,
Enjoyed the review. As an owner of Plus Deck 2 I’ll add a few user comments.
First, the USB is an interesting question. Why go for an almost obsolete serial pin connection when USB is so much easier to use? No idea? Anyone else?
Second, the reviewer didn’t bother to test the WAV/MP3 to tape function. If he had, he would have discovered it doesn’t work. MP3s won’t even go onto the menu for recording and WAV files, while recording, end up in tapes with too much hiss to listen to.
I’ve been in touch with the Plus Deck folks and they really haven’t a clue how to fix it. Something about new software might fix the problem. I suspect something else; hardware failure! The newer models of Plus Deck 2 will no longer include a record to tape function. The official reason being the supplier is no longer makeing the heads. Too bad.
Why record mp3 to tape? I’m a teacher. My texts all have CDs only for classroom use. No classroom has a built in CD but they do offer tape decks (technology rules but not in schools). Making my own custom tapes for lessons was one of the main reasons I bought this unit. Needless to say I’m bummed.
I agree, a good cassette deck, sound card, and connecting cables would do the same job. The Plus Deck 2 offers the same in an elegant package. Too bad it doesn’t work.
Cheers
Dman