ThinkGeek is selling “the ultimate in retro-cool PC mods.”
The PlusDeck 2 is a full-logic cassette deck for your PC. Use it to archive your old cassette tapes of 80s hair bands into digital media files for playback on your PC. Or better yet, archive your favorite audio files or streams onto cassette – perfect for playback in your ’78 Midget that is still not sporting an in-dash CD player.
I have a few hundred cassette tapes from the dark ages of audio, including some field recordings and some FM broadcasts that probably can’t be found elsewhere. PC Magazine’s review of a pre-production unit praises it as “the easiest way we know to copy tapes to your PC” but dings it for “cumbersome” installation and “often-incoherent documentation”:
Setup involves screwing the deck into an external drive bay and cabling it to a slotless back-panel interface card that must then be patched to a serial port and to your sound board’s 1/8-inch line-in/line-out jacks. If your system lacks a serial interface, you’re out of luck, and if your sound board, like our Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro, has the wrong type of jacks, you’ll have to purchase adapters.
I suppose I could hook up an old cassette player to the Line In jacks and do all this manually, but the prospect of one-button dubbing is pretty tempting. I’m looking over the manual and FAQs now to see if the problems are fixed in production units. Anyone tried this device?
Ed Bott 