Originally published at: Check out the best-selling tech deals of 2017 - Boing Boing
Honest question: do audio-tape conversion kits offer anything I couldn’t do with an old Walkman, a copy of Audacity and the right cables?
I really should get around to turning some of my old tapes into MPEGs before they disintegrate completely…
The new year is nearly upon us?
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Presumably they’d offer a higher quality or more reliable connection than the old walkman. An old walkman only has the 3.5mm audio out of the headphones. Easy enough to stick one of these in there and connect it to the microphone port on your PC.
3.5mm audio jacks are prone to noise due to bad fit, pop out easily among other problems. USB cables will be generally better, and presumably that thing is putting out a digital signal as opposed to the walkman’s analog. Which should mean higher quality.
But you’re converting cassette. Its not the highest quality or most reliable source material to begin with. And nearly any other sort of tape deck is probably gonna have a higher quality/better out option. You can usually just pick up a cheap USB interface that’ll accept them if you don’t have the proper plugs on your PC (which you probably don’t).
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Not really.
However if you will soon find that buying a used CD or raiding the local public library is way less of a PITA than encoding from tape.
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Chinese New Year, maybe? A lot of that crap was probably made in China.
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Some of my tapes were never converted to CD as far as I know. Besides, I’m short of cash even for used CDs these days.
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For the ones that haven’t been made to CD go for it. I gave it a try once long ago but it really is time consuming and a PITA to do and I ended up just donating my tapes to Goodwill.
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