A few months ago, I got an email from a friend: “Hey, can you play on a recording I’m doing?”
After I agreed, the unthinkable happened: “OK, I’ll drop off a cassette in your mailbox.”
Cassette? Will he be arriving in a DeLorean with a frantic guy named Doc?
As musicians, we have to be ready for anything. I recently found out about ClearClick's Cassette2USB, a portable, USB-powered tape player that can be used to listen to cassettes or transfer them to digital or CD.
The package showed up with the cassette player, a USB cable, a driver CD and an additional CD of helpful software so you can splice your tracks, label them and burn them onto a CD.
The Cassette2USB player is similar to a Walkman-style tape player. It features Play, Stop, Fast Forward and Rewind buttons, an ⅛-inch headphone jack and a volume knob. It differs from its predecessor in that it has a USB port, a Direction button (You can listen to the other side of the tape without manually flipping it over) and a Loop button (It will automatically flip the tape once one side is finished).
If you have a preferred recording software, you can plug and play instantly by selecting the Cassette2USB player as your input. If you’re completely new to computer recording, the supplied software will guide you, step by step. The CD includes Audacity, a free, open-source, sound-editing software.
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I had no trouble transferring my cassette to MP3 files. Audacity’s plug-ins aren’t the best out there, but I was able to boost the volume a bit and EQ out some of the original tape hiss. If you have a cassette collection of old demos, concert bootlegs or stuff you can’t get elsewhere, this is an easy way to get your music library up to date.
You can't believe everything you read on the Internet, but Billy Voight is a gear reviewer, bassist and guitarist from Pennsylvania. He has Hartke bass amps and Walden acoustic guitars to thank for supplying some of the finest gear on his musical journey. Need Billy's help in creating noise for your next project? Drop him a line at thisguyonbass@gmail.com.
