Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Having a pile of aging cassette mix tapes to archive to .mp3s, I bought the Plusdeck to do the job. It failed in every possible way. Hampered by a badly written manual, with indecipherable instructions like "According to computer manufacturers, the way how to open case and make certain 5.25 bay is different," installing the PlusDeck hardware took an hour. The software was worse: the CD doesn't run (except by a Windows Explore workaround), which doesn't matter anyway: the 3.25c and 3.23, as well as the 3.22 and 3.21 versions of the Plusdeck software record worthless sound files garbled with data artifacts and hissing with static. Bypassing the malfunctioning Plusdeck software by using Audacity instead, I was able to at last make clean .mp3 records off the Plusdeck--only for a while. In its second week of operation, on the ninth cassette, the Plusdeck began SHREDDING TAPES. After pulling out several yards of precious music the Plusdeck had mangled, I opened my computer, removed the Plusdeck, and threw it in the trash. Avoid these horrors by using a Y cable and Audacity instead. A Y cable connects the stereo output of your stereo's tape deck or amplifier to the 3.5-mm line-in input of your computer's sound card. Audacity (downloadable for free) is a compact, powerful and free open-source software application that comes with a very well written help guide (compare that to Plusdeck's atrocious manual) that does for sound files what Photoshop does for image files. Audacity has all the controls you want, including line-in volume, recording in stereo, and even an "amplify" algorithm for reliably increasing the range of your sound files without clipping, and a Belkin Y Audio Cable (12 feet) costs less than five dollars. Unless you enjoy wasted hours, garbled recordings, and ruined tapes, I suggest you avoid the Plusdeck in any of its unreliable present and future incarnations.