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Monday, October 18, 2004

BTO Plusdeck2 Cassette-to-MP3 Converter
The Plusdek2 is an interesting product, but it just feels like it arrived at the MP3 party a few years too late.

First the concept: this $150 tape deck connects to your PC (via a SERIAL cable - INSERT PIERCING SCREAM) and converts your cassette collection into digital MP3 files. It also lets you copy your digital files onto a cassette for listening in a car with no CD player or a boombox. Again, great idea, but too little too late now that the CD player has pretty much shown up even in cheapie rental cars. The real problem: I tried to listen to a few mixed tapes of mine the other day and found the sound quality and hiss was like a bad trip into the days of technology past. Sure, I loved the tape I created and worked on for hours, but the audio was so bad, it just had to go. If you have something on tape you absolutely must convert, then this is a good solution, for the rest of us, we've already packed our tapes away and moved on.

Bill's take: Alice, I almost agree with you --except that my 2000 Jeep Cherokee Sport has a casette radio and the only less than astronomically expensive replacement radios for my '76 Camaro are cassette as well unless I want to butcher the dashboard. (Currently it's blessed with an 8-track!)

While I admit that many of the cassettes I have are probably hissed beyond reasonable use, I have tons of DVDs and no place to play them outside the LofD&PC. Now, if I can hook this little gizmod up to my PC, record oodles of CD sound to PC and then onto casssette (without the yards of wiring and personal attention my dual deck requires) so I can cruise with the tunes I want to listen to, I'd be a happy man. Or maybe I should trade my Camaro in on a cheapie rental car? Nah....

Alice's Alternative: See, this is why I think tape is not the answer. I have an MP3 player (actually I have three which means I also have a little problem) and I use a cassette adapter to access my MP3 Player's entire 500 CD song library and playlists in the car. I also have an FM tranmitter that does the same thing, but sometimes in the city I get a little interference. The point is - don't go back to tape. Just stay in MP3 land and then use your cassette deck simply as an access point for your digital tunes.

# Permalink Posted at 1:36 PM 4 comments Email this Link

Comments on this Item:

The usefulness of this thing escapes me. If you really want to move audio between your PC and cassette, why not use the line in/line out on your sound card and a regular old tape deck? I don't see the need for a dedicated device for this, especially one that uses a serial line. What were they thinking there? My laptop doesn't even have a serial port!

# posted by Anonymous 1:34 PM

Unless you also don't have a USB port, you do have a serial port. Adapters are cheap.

# posted by Bill 1:44 PM

True, USB-serial adapters are available and cheap-ish. But USB is omnipresent and free.

# posted by Anonymous 3:49 PM

First major problem I find with this is that serial interface. If your encoding an mp3 on the device and not on the system, your transferring a smidge over 3mb via serial. That is one track. Say a 10 track tape at 3mb-ish is going to take a while. A serial-to-USB converter isn't likely to increase this speed dramaticially enough to keep me from pulling out my hair just from a single cassette. And if it's transferring the audio information as a wave via that serial connection to be encoded on the host pc, your increasing that frustration by ten times.
As for quality, I can not believe that it would be even moderately tolerable. Consider the cassette tapes that many of us have. Not many of those are in pristine quality. Remember that GIGO doesn't just apply to programming.
What I find as a valid alternative(although I doubt RIAA would agree with me) is the recreation of those tapes on CD via p2p programs. I know that in my life, I've bought at least 5 copies of a certain ZZ Top cassette over the years and now that I find myself with a hissing poor quality yet again, I can not find a legitimate arguement why I should not replace that tape with a downloaded and recreated cd version.
So in the end, I find no compelling reason to spend $150 for something that can be done for substantially cheaper with equal quality (via a tape deck connected to the line in).

# posted by Anonymous 11:05 AM

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