IONTape Express Plus | Cassette Player and Tape-to-Digital Converter with USB & 1/8" Out

I needed to convert my tape collection, and we tired of using headphone jacks. This thing is fantastic.In response to other reviews:1) The unit is plenty loud enough even with the cheapo included headphones2) it's not meant to be used as a walkman. Don't try and you won't be disappointed.3) The included software has good intentions. Poor execution. Use Audacity, not iTunes.Pros:1) It's the right price2) Easy operation3) True plug and play on Vista. Just plug it into a USB port and it worked instantly with Audacity. Did you hear that? No driver problems! Very unexpected, very welcome. This gets ignored when it works well, but people complain about it when it doesn't work.4) Loop feature. Turn on the tape, walk away, come back when it has done both sides.5) Auto volume for recording. Don't have to mess with it.6) No batteries, no power cordsCons:1) Plastic body. It'll hold up for my tape collection, but I would never take it outside.2) Hum during recording. Don't know if it's the tape or the player, but it happened on both cassettes so far.3) No auto-stop. When it has played both sides of the tape, it should know that it is done, right? It doesn't.How to use it (or how it works for me):Plugged in the USB cable (no battery needed, none used). Put in a tape. Pressed play.I have used the included software option and the Audacity option. Audacity is better. Here's why: the included software has a feature. It auto-detects when a song ends and another song begins. But it is not 100% (it missed 3 breaks in the tape I just did, and it was a commercial music tape). And it does not have a noise reduction function, which it desperately needs.Using Audacity, download it for free. Then follow the links on the Audacity site and download the lame MP3 encoder. That's the name, not a description. It works great. Using this setup is simple:1) start Audacity2) click record3) press the play button on the unit4) when you are done recording, click stop in Audacity5) stop the player6) select a small section of "silence" in the recording.7) in the Effect drop-down menu, select Noise Removal8) Click Get Noise Profile9) Select the entire recording (all 90 minutes at once if you have a recording that long)10) in the Effect drop-down menu, select Noise Removal11) Click Remove Noise. Wait for it to finish.12) You can easily see where songs start and finish, so highlight 1 song, go to file-->Export selection as MP3, and save it. Do this for each song. You now have the songs saved, named, and noise is removed. You don't need that tape any more. You win!

Do NOT by any means purchase this piece of equipment!!! I bought the ION Turntable several months ago to adapt all of my old vinyl albums into mp3 files. It was fantastic and worked perfectly! So I thought this ION product would be just as good for cassettes. WRONG!!! I have never been so disappointed in a product as I was with this piece of trash. I put in my first cassette and hit the record button on my PC. The tape speed was NOT consistent, causing the music to modulate between several different keys and waver up and down every few seconds. If you know anything about music (I'm actually a musician and music teacher) you know this is not acceptable. At first I thought maybe it was just a bad cassette, but after trying several different cassettes it was clear that it was indeed the unit. I had to actually find an old tape player from the basement and patch it through the aux port in the ION turntable to transfer the music from the cassettes through the turntable to my PC. Fortunately that worked because I was really pressed for time to finish a project using those old cassettes. So the bottom line is my ION cassette adapter is now in the garbage, and you need to do a little more research to find a better product because this one is NOT IT!!!

After reading a lot of the reviews on this product I was a little leery about its quality and capabilities to transfer a cassette tape to digital. But I decided to go for it anyway.1- Ease of use. The software for the Tape Express installed quickly and easily off of the provided disk. After that its just putting in a tape, connecting your USB cable, hit record the software on your desktop and then hit play on the Tape Express.2 - Quality. It's not a heavy duty walkman like those made in the 80's, nor was it meant to be. If are just using this product to transfer your tapes to the computer, it should last a long time. The headphones that come with this, well they suck. But you can easily plug in your own headphones so that you can better listen to the tracks if you want to while they are recording (it does not play through the computer speakers from the Tape Express, you need the headphones to hear it until the transfer is done).3 - Helpful Hint - When I first recorded one track from a cassette, I could see that it had been recorded but when hitting playback there wasn't any sound. It took me a few minutes to figure it out, but I had to completely unplug the Tape Express from the computer. This may be the way my sound is set up, but it was still trying to play it through the Tape Express. Once I unplugged the usb connection the sound on the computer played fine.4 - I used the item completely on the phantom power through the USB. I think it can take batteries, but I didn't find a need to use any.5 - This will not transfer your cassettes in a pristine like new condition. It will transfer the sound as is. So if you have a crackle-ly warble-ly tape, that is what you are going to hear. You can reduce background noise by using an editing program (such as Audacity free download). To help reduce warble, it may help to put the tape in a regular cassette player that has more power and fast forward the tape to the end and then rewind back to the beginning again. The high speed may help to tighten up the tape and reduce the warble.6- I was able to transfer some tracks from a cassette tape of some home recordings a friend and I made 22 years ago. The tape I had was in fairly decent condition, and the ION did a great job in transferring it to digital format.I received my package a day earlier than expected and the item worked exactly as I hoped it would, even if I had to figure out the sound piece for a few minutes. This is why I rate it 5 stars. I'm not going to fault them for crap headphones :)