Review on AGPtek Portable Cassette to MP3 Converter: Capture, 🎶 Convert, and Preserve Your Tape Collection on Mac and PC by Elmito Yeager

For the price paid it met my expectations. I'm only giving 3 stars but that's because it's just ok and not good or great. I have a lot of work ahead of me because it doesn't make the effort automatic. I use this to convert personally recorded 30-40 year old tapes into MP3 files that I can store on a PC and later transfer to other digital devices. I've already recorded three 90 minute tapes. Based on previous reviews I wasn't expecting this turntable to be very powerful and play ten year old cassettes like they did the day they were recorded. No one should expect tape to slowly deteriorate. As for the device, in addition to being powered by the USB cable, I used two AA batteries to ensure the player was powerful enough to spin the tapes. When it comes to software, do what others say. Discard the included MD, search for Audacity on Google or Bing and get the latest version of Audacity. If like me you need to record to MP3, follow the Audacity help to get the MP3 software plugin. As for me, I'm a fan of portable applications, applications that aren't built into Windows. So I got Audacity from PortableApps.com. First you need PortableApps.com Launcher from the same site, then you will find Audacity as one of the apps. All of this is free. Getting back to Audacity, not only will you use it to copy a tape to a digital file on your PC, you'll likely use it to edit audio files in a variety of ways. For example, you may need to amplify the sound of very old cassettes. You may need to remove tape hiss. You can remove long silences or split songs into separate files. This requires reading a lot of instructions on the Audacity support site. Luckily for me, my son is a heavy user of Audacity and he got me to do a simple noise reduction and boost in minutes.