5.25" Plusdeck 2c RS-232 PC Cassette Deck - Rip Your Old Cassettes to MP3!

by Generic

Product Details

• Item Weight: 4.4 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 4.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• ASIN: B000CSGIJW
• Item model number: 130091
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,358 in Electronics (See Top 100 in Electronics)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: November 20, 2005

Product Description

5.25" Plusdeck 2c RS-232 PC Cassette Deck - Rip Your Old Cassettes to MP3!

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

124 of 125 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars There's A Better Way, September 9, 2007

By 

thattherepaul (Boston, MA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: 5.25" Plusdeck 2c RS-232 PC Cassette Deck - Rip Your Old Cassettes to MP3! (Electronics)

Having a pile of aging cassette mix tapes to archive to .mp3s, I bought the Plusdeck to do the job. It failed in every possible way.

Hampered by a badly written manual, with indecipherable instructions like "According to computer manufacturers, the way how to open case and make certain 5.25 bay is different," installing the PlusDeck hardware took an hour. The software was worse: the CD doesn't run (except by a Windows Explore workaround), which doesn't matter anyway: the 3.25c and 3.23, as well as the 3.22 and 3.21 versions of the Plusdeck software record worthless sound files garbled with data artifacts and hissing with static. Bypassing the malfunctioning Plusdeck software by using Audacity instead, I was able to at last make clean .mp3 records off the Plusdeck--only for a while. In its second week of operation, on the ninth cassette, the Plusdeck began SHREDDING TAPES. After pulling out several yards of precious music the Plusdeck had mangled, I opened my computer, removed the Plusdeck, and threw it in the trash.

Avoid these horrors by using a Y cable and Audacity instead. A Y cable connects the stereo output of your stereo's tape deck or amplifier to the 3.5-mm line-in input of your computer's sound card. Audacity (downloadable for free) is a compact, powerful and free open-source software application that comes with a very well written help guide (compare that to Plusdeck's atrocious manual) that does for sound files what Photoshop does for image files. Audacity has all the controls you want, including line-in volume, recording in stereo, and even an "amplify" algorithm for reliably increasing the range of your sound files without clipping, and a Belkin Y Audio Cable (12 feet) costs less than five dollars.

Unless you enjoy wasted hours, garbled recordings, and ruined tapes, I suggest you avoid the Plusdeck in any of its unreliable present and future incarnations.

41 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Lots of bugs. Great when it works., October 26, 2006

By 

Aaron Contorer (San Diego, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: 5.25" Plusdeck 2c RS-232 PC Cassette Deck - Rip Your Old Cassettes to MP3! (Electronics)

The machine itself is great, but the software required to use it is horrendously buggy. It crashes about once per three tapes. Sometimes it corrupts the first 5 seconds of sound in every song. Sometimes it crashes at the end of a tape, sometimes at the beginning. It's the buggiest piece of software I have used in years. That's a shame, because minus the bugs, it'd be a marvelous product. When it works, it works great.

33 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Works as advertised, but software is weak, February 17, 2007

By 

vaaesthete (Virginia USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: 5.25" Plusdeck 2c RS-232 PC Cassette Deck - Rip Your Old Cassettes to MP3! (Electronics)

The overall package is well built and well documented. The installation was straightforward and only took about 30 minutes to get up and running. It does work, but, if you are like me, most of your tapes are getting pretty old and are not in the greatest of shape, sound-wise. Because the software lacks any capabilities to perform sound leveling and noise reduction, your resulting .mp3s that are all over the place, sound-wise.

As a cheap work-around, get the WindowsXP Plus! Digital Media Edition. The Analog Recorder works well enough and is simple to use. Plus it is only $15 to download. You can use it with the plusdeck to play your tapes and provide input and then use the analog Recorder to actually record the files and convert to .mp3. If you get a tape player with a line out, you can connect your tape player right to the back of your computer and accomplish the same without the Plusdeck2c.