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

This cassette recorder is just what I needed to finally convert a bunch of my old cassettes to MP3. Advantages: - Can be connected directly to a PC/Mac with a USB cable as a USB microphone. - Allows easy use of any audio recording software to capture sound from tapes - Auto-reverse feature makes it easy to record an entire tape without tending it - Direct USB power supply. Can be powered by two AA batteries or an optional 3V/500mA adapter (not included) if you want to use without USB (included with the headphones). Cons: - Instruction manual. It's not great. I've seen worse. Basically, it will get you started, but don't even bother with the CD. Just download the latest Audacity and LAME encoder and you're good to go. - It would be nice to enable high speed recording for faster tape conversion. - No built-in speaker. You can only listen to cassettes from the device using headphones. The headphones that come with it are very cheap. Cheap construction. My workflow when converting my tapes is to insert the tape, press record in Audacity and press play on the player, then set the timer. slightly less than the length of the ribbon. This allows me to record a tape without having to constantly monitor and control it. When the timer runs out, I know the tape is running out and I'm ready to stop the player and Audacity recording. Please note that this player has no recording function. If you want to record cassettes, this will not work. That's a plus for me as I tend to accidentally hit that record button and get tired of using cassette tapes altogether. I just took my 25 year old tapes and converted them. The sound quality is to be expected. Initially, my tapes don't sound perfect, so if there was any extra noise or hum, I wasn't aware of it. You could always do the same thing with a 1/8 to 1/8 headphone adapter if the cassette player was lying around, but the only thing I had was a huge old boombox that was on its last legs. It's much smaller than that and easy to store. I keep it in the original box it came in and keep it in my desk drawer. UPDATE - 12/14/14 I recorded more tapes and came back to my computer at the end of my timer and the tape was barely spinning. I assumed the batteries were dead. I replaced them the next day but couldn't get the player to do anything. Won't play, reverse or anything like that. I didn't have it connected to USB. So I plugged it in and then tried it and it worked. It turned out that my batteries didn't work at all. I was under the impression that the device wasn't USB powered, but it wasn't, and I double-checked the [poorly written] manual and confirmed it. As such, I've updated my review to include the pros of powered USB operation rather than the cons. My tape slowdown issue was most likely due to my computer going into a power saving mode while recording. Audacity continued to work, but the device's power supply was most likely reduced by my USB port. I temporarily changed my computer's sleep settings from 1 hour to 2 hours until I'm done converting my tapes. I also completely removed the batteries. I was able to get the batteries to work after being more careful in inserting them, but I would advise anyone who says their battery is "not working" to check the battery terminals or just connect them via USB. I think the best person to buy this for is for those who want to convert tapes to MP3 through their computer. If you want to use it like a regular cassette player, it's better to use a standard cassette player (aka Walkman).