Amazon Cassette Tape to MP3 Digitizer/Portable Cassette Player - Is it any Good?
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- čas přidán 16. 07. 2024
- Maybe I'm a glutton for punishment, but I ordered this Cassette to MP3 digitizer on Amazon recently and decided to take a look at it. There are many reasons for wanting to transfer old tapes to a digital format, so we'll see if this device lives up to its advertising. In this video, I'll take a look at how it's put together, what it sounds like in a direct capture and USB capture, and compare it to a known good Sony cassette deck. Could this be a solution to the problem of converting tape to digital, or will it be a huge disappointment? Stick around to find out!
0:00 Introduction
0:46 Will it be any good?
1:37 Why Digitize Cassettes at all?
2:35 Unboxing and a Look Around
8:06 Direct Audio Feed Capture
10:16 USB Audio Feed Capture
11:50 Final Thoughts and Opinion
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#cassette #cassetteplayer #walkman #digitization #analog #analogtape #electronicscreators #vintageelectronics #electronics - Věda a technologie
I have a line-level to USB audio capture device. Not only do I like to capture cassettes, but I do records, 8 Tracks, etc. I have a bunch of music by local artists that shows up a Goodwill and so forth.
0:46 - I'm guessing they produced a low-quality cassette player and are using the C-media chip, which is found in many knock-off sound cards. The chip's microphone input is connected to the amplifier of the cassette heads which explains the bad quality.
11:04 - At least it's in stereo but that sound signature is typical for C-media sound chip.
I've used Cheap usb soundcard with stereo line in + decent cassette player with clean mechanism with great results.
Keep in mind that newly produced cassette player's won't have dolby support either so that's nerfed the quality just abit.
I agree with you 100%,sir . A real cassette deck is the only way to with a good motherboard that has excellent audio characteristics or run the audio into a good sound card. Amazon is just perpetuating the old opinion that audio cassettes are low-fi. Time to return that particular device to Amazon.
It's bad equipment that gives the cassette a bad reputation.
I had the same cassette player I think, but in an opaque black case (for £5 in a charity shop). I just wanted something to see what was on 40 year old cassettes I had and it did the job - I didn't want a big cassette deck or pay for an overpriced walkman from the 80's. Obviously this isn't a top-end piece of equipment, and people keep buying this stuff so they're still going to make them.
The box it came in was similar to an IPhone in quality though.
Another thing pointed out other contributes is not all vinyl or cassettes crossed the digital divide. One immediate album comes to mind it is the album TEAR ME APART by Tanya Tucker
!! It Is Proven that Magnetic Tape once taken care of can hold data for 50 or more years and a lot more Longer than digital Media storage like hard drives, CD's DVD's or Flash drives etc. It would Be better to buy new unused cassettes and re-dub them or copy them on a good player. Cassettes are more fun than Digital Anyways.
You're not wrong, though tapes can often have their lives shortened by less-than-ideal storage conditions. Mould can set in, sticking the layers of tape together on the spool. And the magnetic oxide layer can be made to flake off of the plastic tape. I watch a CZcams channel dedicated to transferring old VHS tapes, and he has encountered plenty of tapes that are in really bad shape after barely more than 25 years.
Aside from the digitization part, another consideration is if you need to find out what's on your large unlabeled tape collection, a real deck will be much easier, since it won't need batteries and will likely have a counter/music search. The only thing this otherwise awful device might be useful for is recovering answering machine messages, which would be low quality and voice only. Very practical advice in this video, and I agree- no need to digitize pre-recorded albums and better results with a real cassette deck.
I was thinking the same thing myself. This would be okay for answering machine and dictation cassettes if you don't have anything else handy, and that's about it. If you're even _thinking_ about transferring music, it has to be done with an old deck at this point. All the new machines these days use the same awful mechanism as this one.
I have a cassette deck from Denon wich I made a few transfers in the past.
Hooked up to my amplifier and then output to minijack input on the computer wich the sound is captured by the soundcard, then I record with audacity.
The cassette deck now is only used to get the signal through from the turntable, mainly because in that way I can adjust the left and right channel to make the channels have the same balance.
My opinion on pre-recorded tapes is that some sound great and some sound terrible, it just depends on how much it has been used or not and what the recording was back in the day.
Nowadays pre-recorded tapes got scares and even in thrift stores or flea markets you pay quit a bit of money on them, if I can get them for really cheap I will buy them but is has been for years I've seen good cassettes for reasonable prices here in the netherlands.
I'll stick to vinyl for home recording and listening and cd when I'm travelling .. never liked streaming services for that.
Not all commercially produced music that was available on cassette made it to CD or other digital media - you may have cassettes of bands who's music is no longer in print and hasn't been for a while.
That's very true.
You forgot to show how the set up of going from a tape deck to computer sets itself up and its important to show the connections from output into input.
I think that wanna be walkman is a cheap piece of crap. Pure and simple. However, it still made for an enjoyable video. 🙂👍
I agree 100%! I don't think any of us expected it to be great.
@@VintageElectronicsChannel I agree, I didn't have high hopes in the first place.
besides when almost most of these New Portable Cassette are so bad to digitalize high quality or better prerecorded tapes. I think for like lo-fi instrumental part effect might be a good idea to use it. Not really for archiving it.
And i think most of Prerecorded tapes are not equally produced depending from studios or countries are prerecorded and also what kind of Deck you use. Some tapes are even produced in Chrome Tapes, most of the tapes are Normal Bias but it also has specific Dolby NR prerecorded tapes (such as B, rarely C and S). My Sony Deck has Dolby S and as far i digitalize it, it sounds very decent. I think to digitalize is a good recommendation for it, but finding a Deck with Dolby S are kinda pricey to find. To my opinion, it really much depends what kind of Tapes are recommended for the playback and what kind of Deck you use to the features.
otherwise if some decks dont have the ability to set up the Types, it exist a Software called DDi Codec, its a software that emulates the Dolby NR and the tape type EQ you set. Results is kinda inbetween by using it. Its not a bad software in any means. its useful but from playback, it can be either good, bad or mid. Which this software was recommended for the newest TEAC decks that doesnt include the Dolby NR and Type settings.
thought it was interesting that the headphone out was a lot slower than the usb capture, was that ecause the machine needed warming up/breaking in? either way i fully agree and use the capture method of separate devices
Yes, the more it played, it loosened up. It never ran at the correct speed, even after playing an entire tape.
Excellent presentation. Perhaps for historical preservation, the focus should be on a quality analog recording. Most originals are Taped first. Digitizing methods come and go, A/D converters are getting better all the time, but you need to have a tape version or anything not digital to start with. There is currently no 100% substitute for analog music on analog recordings, to include vinal.
hi been using a m-audio cards for a very long time i have a amd3|+ with old pci ports
i do have a 6 pci mum pcb P4 the only thing
is the ram it take
gamer love the old mum pcb's they are now hard to find m-audio can take
16 tracks 4 x 44 delta cards or 1010 LT cards
it gets hard to work out all that is going on
when there's alot
cassette to digi there are some low cost decks that work great i have some RS101
low cost decks
i know about the 12v ac x2 i have a power brick i made for the decks they run ace
the price of cassette decks is now crazy high
Jeez, I haven't heard anything that bad in years. The best way is to ensure you have a perfect, well-aligned and serviced cassette deck capable of proper Dolby B/C decoding, and preferably a three-head machine as the playback head is better optimized to handle the higher frequencies rather than a combined REC/PLAY head that is always a compromise. Capturing to a computer is fine, but beware that some on-board sound cards can be a little noisy. If you really want to push the boat out, opt for something like a Tascam SS-R250N, capture in uncompressed WAV files and save directly to a memory card or USB stick. This will give you the cleanest recording possible and can be easily copied to a computer for subsequent editing. In this day and age of inexpensive high-capacity hard drives, I see little justification for using lossy compression schemes like mp3, just save as a WAV or FLAC file and enjoy the highest quality. then if you do edit anything, any subsequent resaving of a file won't further compress and degrade the quality.
Cudos on the tape used!! 😊👀
Didn't want the tape to be a reason it sounded bad. 😀
it looks like our society went backwards with Walkman's Tape Decks technology and Tapes as well,
and we want to flay to Mars , yeah right 🙂
I don't digitize, but with my cables for tuning up decks, I would just RCA out from the deck to the microphone jack on my PC and call it a day.
But this crappy player would be good for relubing cassettes, or just running sticky cassettes fwd/rev/fdw/rev to unstick them.
Agreed 💯, no need to be a musician to hear how bad that sound is with the motor speed deviation . Useless stuff, definitely. Even just for playing cassette tapes
It wasn't good enough for any purpose. Maybe as a tape rewinder. Lol
Sincere question: what is the point of digitizing cassettes when every piece of music ever recorded is already available digitally elsewhere? 🤔 isn't the whole point of the cassettes the pleasure of playing them itself?
Thats my point in this video exactly, so I agree with you 100%. Almost every prerecorded cassette is available digitally in much better quality. Digitizing those is pointless. If it's a personal recording, then digitize it. Otherwise, I think it's a waste.
@@VintageElectronicsChannel I totally agree 😊👍🏻👍🏻
There are songs that changed over time and got a re-edit. I have multiple albums that changed some songs for whatever reason. On some it is obvious, some have only subtle minor changes. If you want the exact version you have on tape once and can't find it anywhere else: there is your reason. Some people think that you make the world a better place when not saying bad words or others try to hide how childish they where ...
For me it’s more a nostalgic thing. I digitize old mixtapes recorded from fm-radio with the DJ talking trough it a bit. Also tapes on which I was talking as a kid or just radio recordings.
So for me the quality is not that important.
Wouldn’t use this piece of sh*t for it though 😂. Wow it was really bad!
I can think of a bunch of things that probably exist only on tape: EPs and demos from small-time acts that never made it big. Small production runs from choirs and such. Content that's been kept in a vault since the late 1980s...
Makes any tapes into V A P O R W A V E
Basically the same product sold under many brands on Amazon.
Hi! other very good interesting video! The reader is rubbish, but the news is the auto reverse and not the same Tanashin mechanism! does it work (auto reverse)?
The auto reverse does worl, sadly the sound quality makes it unlistenable
send your precious cassettes to a digitizing local business....THAT's the best way digitizing "tapes"!!!
Most places are going to be using the same junk.
Thanks, I think (do have cassettes I need to replace pads and digitize). Wouldn't it be better to work backwards from a recommended product though?
I shop on Amazon all the time. I have yet to buy anything there. hehe
Many times I've searched for brand name items, but they're not sold through Amazon - they do have inferior copies.
Jefe Bozo has contempt for Amazon customers and workers, but gets a transaction fee for any sale.
I see stuff my Sister & Nieces buy there, and I am reminded of toys & trinkets we used to buy our daughter from 25cent vending machines -- she had to have them, but only held her attention for two minutes.
This somehow sounds even worse than my current portable cassette player, which is also a low end unit (specifically a GPX C3142)…. which is why I use an actual cassette deck for digitizing my cassette tapes!
2 days ago I felt into this trap... because I have some tapes I really want to digitize.... and until now I ended up on this video/channel cause it doesnt even work... but checking other reactions its not even worth my time to find out :(
Ill have to find another solution
That’s absolutely dreadful. Runs slow with terrible W&F
It ended up being even worse than I expected, and I was expecting it to be bad.
I had the silver version of this, its every bit as bad as I remember it, bought myself a double tape deck instead, miles better.
Not sure if it's the track but I can hear quite a bit W&F on the Sony deck??
i got to thinking about this and came to the conclusion that the track used is a bit lofi in and of itself and tape imulation in modern digital music is all the rage in studios so..would not be surprised if it was the track, though definitely worse on the reviewed machine
@@lycancatt4248 yeah I think you're right.
It's the track. I tested Sony machine and it's within spec for wow and flutter. I should have picked a better track.
Try using a normal type I tape, the portable deck doesn't support Metal tapes
It wouldn't be able to record on a metal tape properly, but for playback purposes it really doesn't matter. The tape type doesn't affect the motor noise and wow and flutter, which is the problem with this deck anyway.
Wow, this is truly hilariously bad! Using a decent cassette deck with a good audio interface like your MOTU is indeed the best way forward for digitizing tapes. In fact, the MOTU may already be overkill given that its specs are orders of magnitude better than those of even the best cassette tapes.
Yes, Chinese devices are really unusable for music. I have an Ezcap cassette to mp3 usb model 231, the mechanics are identical to yours which is model 218.The wow is unlistenable, the mp3s created are poor in bass and have audio artifacts. The only serious solution seems to be a vintage cassette deck with a Zoom H1n recorder. I also used Shazam a lot to find records recorded from the radio when I was young. Before a capture, be able to carefully adjust the azimuth of the playhead to mono if possible to get the brightest sound. Hello from Belgium 🙂🙋♂️
Welcome to the channel! I agree the best method to digitize cassettes is using a good deck and interface. These portable solutions aren't good for anything.
Wow you don't know enough to look for a hinge
You may want to break in the mechanism before reviewing it!
I played it for about 30 minutes in between opening it and playing a tape on camera.
Rural parts of the world this junk is as normal to have than an iPhone especially Asia
This doesn't really sound that good and you can hear the differences from your SONY cassette tape player v.s,this USB tape cassette player here.
My goodness, the transport on that device is truly awful. Audio quality is otherwise acceptable but if you can't get a stable transport, why would you ever want a digital capture of it. Stick with the Sony. Way way better!
I guess you get what you pay for!
this is too slow ... and bad W&F... no bass
That's terrible!
That's probably the worst tape player sound ever......
I thought the Jensen from Amazon I reviewed a while back was terrible... this one is way worse.
2:00 - Unfortunately, there are some artists whose music has not nor ever will be put on scam sites like spotify and were never released on CD. Digitizing tapes or vinyl may be the only way to preserve them.
8:50 - You couldn't find something better in the audio library instead of that garbage noise?
A cool looking $20 item = garbage. Everything about this says pass. That sounds absolutely horrible!
Sounds awful & speed slow hear the WoW & Flutter. To be expected from a cheap Chinese garbage made product. That player isn't made for metal tapes.