This looks interesting. Here is a cassette drive that one installs into a pc.
Text of forwarded message follows:
Subject: Read and write audio cassettes on a pc http://www.computeramerica.com/content/columns/craig/2004/2004-10-25.htm
Craig Crossman, National Newspaper Computer Columnist
CASSETTES ARE NEVER COMING BACK
We live in a digital age and no where 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 in to any record store today and all you see are CDs and DVDs. MP3 music files stream over the Internet, to be down loaded in to 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 some one 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 any way.
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 in to one of the available 5.25 drive bays inside your PC. After installation, you simply insert a cassette in to 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 in to MP3 or WAV files. Once converted, you can do any thing 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 though 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 on to blank cassettes you insert in to 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 in to the standards of the present day. $149.99.
http://www.plusdeck.com
Craig Crossman is a Knight Ridder newspaper columnist writing about computers and technology. He also hosts the nation's longest running nationally syndicated radio talk show on computers and technology, Computer America, heard on the Business Talk Radio net work week nights at 10PM ET. In South Florida, you can hear a rebroadcast of a selected Computer America show each Sunday evening at 8PM ET on WJNO 1290AM.
End of forwarded message text:
John
Very funny Scotty ... now beam down my clothes !
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