CASSETTES ARE NEVER COMING BACK
We live in a digital age and nowhere is that more apparent than
in the world of recorded music. Analog media such as vinyl records
and cassette tapes are all but extinct. Walk into any record store
today and all you see are CDs and DVDs. MP3 music files stream over
the Internet, to be downloaded into tiny MP3 players we carry in our
pockets, stored on hard disk drives in our computers and burned onto
optical media to be played on our stereo equipment.
Yet you are out there and you all know who you are. You're the
ones that still have a huge music collection of hundreds, even
thousands of cassette tapes stored in closets, in storage boxes, or
stacked neatly on tiny little shelves in some kind of display case.
And while you may still locate someone to maintain your antique
cassette player, you know that eventually your valuable collection
is doomed to go the way of the 78 RPM record and 8-Track tape. And
that doesn't even factor in the fact that the magnetic tape inside
all of your cassettes will eventually decompose and become useless
anyway.
 But
fear not as there remains hope for your rapidly deteriorating
cassette tape collection. Now there is the PlusDeck 2 made by BTO
which stands for "Beyond The Ordinary." The PlusDeck 2 is a fully
functional cassette deck for your personal computer. The PlusDeck 2
is an internal drive that fits into one of the available 5.25 drive
bays inside your PC. After installation, you simply insert a
cassette into the drive. The included recording software allows you
to transfer all of the music from the cassette directly to your
computer's hard drive and converts it into MP3 or WAV files. Once
converted, you can do anything with the files that you can do with
any other digitally encoded music.
The entire process of transferring a tape's contents to the
computer only requires a few clicks of the mouse. Part of what makes
it easy to convert the entire contents of a single tape is that the
PlusDeck 2 plays and records with Auto Reverse. You can easily play
or record on sides A and B of the tape without ejecting it. On the
down side, according to the company there is no support for
cassettes that used some of the more advanced recording tape such as
chrome or metal tapes. And tapes encoded with Dolby Noise Reduction
are not supported either. However, you should be able to compensate
for some of the loss of frequency response by using most any digital
recording software that offers graphic equalization and sound
filters.
But even thought the PlusDeck 2 falls a bit short, it's still a
viable option if you own a large collection of music on cassettes.
Plus you can use the PlusDeck 2 as a standard cassette player. Just
pop one in and listen to the music directly from the tape through
your PC's speakers. And if you just can't ever let go of the medium,
you can actually take all of your computer's audio files and record
them onto blank cassettes you insert into the PlusDeck 2 (if you can
still find any). With the PlusDeck 2, at least you'll be able to
play, store, preserve and enhance your cassette tape collection and
bring your whole cassette library into the standards of the present
day. $149.99.
http://www.plusdeck.com |
