Others say...

"Excelent product!"
I have a lot of tapes to save and Plusdeck was the best solution. Im waiting to see the next generation. Ive seen that in Europe they have already Plusdeck EX which is not integrated to the PC.

"Poor sound quality"
I was able to install the device and get it working without any problems. I converted some pre-recorded tapes. The sound quality of the mp3 file was poor. It sounded worse than the pre-recorded tapes, which had pretty good sound quality. Some of the mp3 files the device made had patches of garbled playback. Most of the mp3 files it made had this problem. I do not recommed this device if you want quality mp3 files from your converted tapes.

"There's A Better Way"
Having a pile of aging cassette mix tapes to archive to .mp3s, I bought the Plusdeck to do the job. It failed in every possible way.

Hampered by a badly written manual, with indecipherable instructions like "According to computer manufacturers, the way how to open case and make certain 5.25 bay is different," installing the PlusDeck hardware took an hour. The software was worse: the CD doesn't run (except by a Windows Explore workaround), which doesn't matter anyway: the 3.25c and 3.23, as well as the 3.22 and 3.21 versions of the Plusdeck software record worthless sound files garbled with data artifacts and hissing with static. Bypassing the malfunctioning Plusdeck software by using Audacity instead, I was able to at last make clean .mp3 records off the Plusdeck--only for a while. In its second week of operation, on the ninth cassette, the Plusdeck began SHREDDING TAPES. After pulling out several yards of precious music the Plusdeck had mangled, I opened my computer, removed the Plusdeck, and threw it in the trash.

Avoid these horrors by using a Y cable and Audacity instead. A Y cable connects the stereo output of your stereo's tape deck or amplifier to the 3.5-mm line-in input of your computer's sound card. Audacity (downloadable for free) is a compact, powerful and free open-source software application that comes with a very well written help guide (compare that to Plusdeck's atrocious manual) that does for sound files what Photoshop does for image files. Audacity has all the controls you want, including line-in volume, recording in stereo, and even an "amplify" algorithm for reliably increasing the range of your sound files without clipping, and a Belkin Y Audio Cable (12 feet) costs less than five dollars.

Unless you enjoy wasted hours, garbled recordings, and ruined tapes, I suggest you avoid the Plusdeck in any of its unreliable present and future incarnations.


"No Support & Product Marginal"
I've got about 300 cassettes that I wanted to convert.

The installation is fairly straightforward. No problems there.

Connections APPEAR to be straightforward, but you have NO idea, and NO way to check.

After about four hours of screwing around trying to get this to work, I was finally able to start recording. At least I thought. I kept doing various things. Cassettes APPEARED to be recorded. When I tried to make a CD I got nothing. A few more hours. Finally came to the realization that if I saved the files as WAV files, I got nothing. If I saved the files as MP3 files, everything was fine. Now I get to covert the files from MP3 files to WAV files. Not an insurmountable task, but . . .

Was NEVER able to get onto their website.

I'm going to keep it, but I'd wait for something else if I was in the market.

"Not great software or support, but does the job."
I was really excited about this product because I couldn't find any other devices or software that claimed to do unattended digitizing of audio cassette tapes.

The software has some strange side effects and the serial cable control of the deck, absolutely required if you want the unattended benefits, didn't work at all after I installed it.

The factory web site has a useful forum where I could see that many people had the same problem of the serial port connection not working, reported as "hardware error". For over a year, the factory seems to be stumped by this problem. For some people it apparently works out of the box.

I found two work arounds for the problem. First, the user manual says that a USB-Serial converter will not work with their software. I tried it, and it worked fine, but I was still bothered that the single built in serial port didn't work.

With more investigation, I found the Windows XP has a program called "ups.exe" that you can see running in the process list. It apparently always runs and always takes over COM1. This prevents the Plusdeck software from being able to connect to it. When I killed the process ( I don't have a ups on that machine ) COM1 became available and the plusdeck software worked, controlled the decks stopping, playing, etc.

With that fix, I am able to tell the plusdeck software to digitize side A and then side B all in one operation, but to separate files.

WARNING! For the somewhat slow computer that I have installed this on, if I request side A and side B as MP3 files, the software digitizes side A as a raw .wav file, then converts it to .mp3 while side B is being digitized. It seemed like the computer couldn't keep up for some reason and the side B file was corrupted, like broken up speech.

My solution was to ask Plusdeck2 to digitize side A and side B to separate files, but to leave them as .wav files. Then I used LAME to convert the .wav files to .mp3 files. This works well and I have successfully digitized about 20 45-minute-per-side cassette tapes. I have about a lot more to go as I convert a collection of 100 book summaries on a set of 50 cassettes.

So I have suffered some, but I am glad to have this to convert this large collection of tapes.