Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

This things works great. And with the ability to seperate each song instead of just one large mp3 file is even better. My expectation were greatly exceeded when I recieved it. Recommend it to anyone who is a music enthusiast or just has a large cassette collection like I do and want to digitilize it

I've got about 300 cassettes that I wanted to convert.

The installation is fairly straightforward. No problems there.

Connections APPEAR to be straightforward, but you have NO idea, and NO way to check.

After about four hours of screwing around trying to get this to work, I was finally able to start recording. At least I thought. I kept doing various things. Cassettes APPEARED to be recorded. When I tried to make a CD I got nothing. A few more hours. Finally came to the realization that if I saved the files as WAV files, I got nothing. If I saved the files as MP3 files, everything was fine. Now I get to covert the files from MP3 files to WAV files. Not an insurmountable task, but . . .

Was NEVER able to get onto their website.

I'm going to keep it, but I'd wait for something else if I was in the market.

I have "installed" this item and it sits here and collects dust due to the buggy , immature install design, you have to hook up cables to parallel and serial ports and if you don't have them then "simply" add them.. crap , Should be redesigned as a simple external box with usp2 interface.. this is a lousy product. michael Railey Dallas, tx.

I was able to install the device and get it working without any problems. I converted some pre-recorded tapes. The sound quality of the mp3 file was poor. It sounded worse than the pre-recorded tapes, which had pretty good sound quality. Some of the mp3 files the device made had patches of garbled playback. Most of the mp3 files it made had this problem. I do not recommed this device if you want quality mp3 files from your converted tapes.

I was really excited about this product because I couldn't find any other devices or software that claimed to do unattended digitizing of audio cassette tapes.

The software has some strange side effects and the serial cable control of the deck, absolutely required if you want the unattended benefits, didn't work at all after I installed it.

The factory web site has a useful forum where I could see that many people had the same problem of the serial port connection not working, reported as "hardware error". For over a year, the factory seems to be stumped by this problem. For some people it apparently works out of the box.

I found two work arounds for the problem. First, the user manual says that a USB-Serial converter will not work with their software. I tried it, and it worked fine, but I was still bothered that the single built in serial port didn't work.

With more investigation, I found the Windows XP has a program called "ups.exe" that you can see running in the process list. It apparently always runs and always takes over COM1. This prevents the Plusdeck software from being able to connect to it. When I killed the process ( I don't have a ups on that machine ) COM1 became available and the plusdeck software worked, controlled the decks stopping, playing, etc.

With that fix, I am able to tell the plusdeck software to digitize side A and then side B all in one operation, but to separate files.

WARNING! For the somewhat slow computer that I have installed this on, if I request side A and side B as MP3 files, the software digitizes side A as a raw .wav file, then converts it to .mp3 while side B is being digitized. It seemed like the computer couldn't keep up for some reason and the side B file was corrupted, like broken up speech.

My solution was to ask Plusdeck2 to digitize side A and side B to separate files, but to leave them as .wav files. Then I used LAME to convert the .wav files to .mp3 files. This works well and I have successfully digitized about 20 45-minute-per-side cassette tapes. I have about a lot more to go as I convert a collection of 100 book summaries on a set of 50 cassettes.

So I have suffered some, but I am glad to have this to convert this large collection of tapes.

I received this item as a Christmas gift and was excited about the idea of converting my library of tapes to mp3 files. The actual install on my machine (HP Pavillion 1226n) took about an hour but I needed to add a serial port since my machine did not come with one. I have USB and Firefire out the kazootie but no serial port. (Why do they not make this deck for a USB port? I mean serial is primitive by today's standards. Anyway, got the unit installed, (had to remove one of the CD Rom drives, so make sure you have a spare 5.25 bay to put this puppy in if you're determined to have it), fired up the software, and we were off and running. The software loaded fine and while it isn't replete with user features, it is serviceable. The problem is the deck itself. The second tape I played was eaten. And I mean chewed to bits. This was not some moldy tape that had been sitting in my convertible visor for that past 5 years. Nor was this a 120 minute job caked with dust. This was just a standard 90 minute tape that plays fine in my car and every other deck I have. The Plus Deck 2c is an auto reverse deck, which in theory should be helpful, but I don't think it is of the quality of some of the better decks you can find in today's vehicles. The real problem here is that this deck should be highly resistant to jamming and eating tapes if it is really going to be worth buying. I mean, you are probably purchasing it to replace your old tapes. Key word here...OLD. If this little ditty will only play NEW tapes, then you won't need it, will you? The other thing is, I think this would work much better as a peripheral stand alone plugged into a USB or Firewire port. The deck could be a pop top or open front where you can get at the tape drives and clean them when necessary. This unit is like a car unit that swallows the whole cassette. If you get a tape wound in there, good luck. Anyway, I like the idea of this product, but it was executed poorly in my experience. I would not bother with it.

Easy to install as are all pci devices that simply go in a bay. No innovation there. I have a few "decades" under my belt working with pc's but I have yet to get the sound working correctly. I even spent more money and bought a pci board the manufacturer said was needed (but is not stated as needed on the advertisements or on the box anywhere). I have sent quite a few e mails to their support but only received one reply. In this reply, they were proud to announce that the usb version was coming out in several months. Believe it or not, this did not fix my current sound problems. Their support has basically totally ignored me and is totally nonexistent. I would not advise anyone to buy this device. Mine is being packed up and is going back.