Review on Ion Tape Express Plus: Cassette Player and USB Converter – Preserve and Digitize Your Tapes! by Darin Marshall

I needed to rearrange my cassette collection and we were fed up with the headphone jacks. This is a fantastic thing. Regarding other reviews: 1) the device is quite loud even with cheap headphones 2) it is not intended as a playback device. Don't try it and you won't be disappointed. 3) The included software is well intentioned. Bad performance. Use Audacity, not iTunes. Pros: 1) It's the right price 2) Easy to use 3) True plug and play technology in Vista. Just plug it into a USB port and it's ready to use with Audacity. Did you hear it? No problems with drivers! Very unexpected, very beautiful. It's ignored when it works well, but people complain about it when it doesn't work. 4) cycle function. Turn on the tape, walk away, come back when she's done both sides. 5) Automatic volume for recording. You don't have to play around with it. 6) No batteries, no power cords. Disadvantages: 1) Plastic housing. It fits in my cassette collection but I would never take it outside. 2) Buzzing while recording. I don't know if it's a cassette or a turntable, but it's been the case with both cassettes so far. 3) No hitchhiking. If he plays both sides of the tape he should know it's done, right? It's not like this. How to use it (or how it works for me): USB cable connected (battery not required, not used). insert tape. Pressed the play button. I used the included software option and the Audacity option. Impertinence is better. And here's why: There's a feature in the bundled software. It automatically detects when one song ends and another song begins. But it's not 100% (there are missing 3 breaks in the tape I just recorded and it was a commercial music tape). And it lacks the noise canceling feature it badly needs. Download it for free with Audacity. Then follow the links on the Audacity website and download the lame MP3 encoder. This is a title, not a description. That works great. Using this setting is easy: 1) Start Audacity 2) Press the record button 3) Press the play button on your device 4) When you are done recording, press the stop button in Audacity 5) Stop the player 6 ) Select a small section of "Silence" in the recording 7) Select "Effect" " "Remove Noise" from the drop-down menu 8) Click "Get Noise Profile" 9) Select the entire recording (all 90 minutes at once, long recording if available) 10) From the Effect drop-down menu, select Remove Noise 11) Click on Remove Noise . Wait for it to finish. 12) You can easily see where the songs start and end, so select 1 song, go to File -> Export Selected as MP3 and save it. Do this for each song. You have now saved the songs, named them and removed the noise. You no longer need this tape. You won!