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Provides: Record your cassettes directly to your computer

Developer: Ion Audio

Minimum Requirements: Mac OS 9 or X, sound card or integrated audio, USB 1.1 port

Retail Price: $149.99

Availability: Out now

I own cassettes. Looking back, I can't for the life of me figure out why. Why buy albums on cassette when I could just pick up the LP and tape it? Cassettes would get tangled up in players. They'd get dropouts. They'd get lost in the cars of classmates who's names I didn't even know. Cassettes were useless. Yet I have them. My entire Dead Milkmen collection is on cassette, including a couple albums that are otherwise out of print on all formats. It's sad.

Now, there's no shortage of devices that will help you copy your vinyl LPs to your computer (the recently reviewed TTUSB10 from Ion Audio, for example), but precious few cassette decks. Thankfully, Ion is here to help, again, with the Tape 2 PC.

Something to consider straight off is why such a device would be needed when you can plug any tape deck or Walkman into your computer via a USB audio capture device. Unlike turntables, after all, cassette decks don't need preamps. Indeed, I'd tried this a couple times myself with my old Sony Walkman, but the audio was never that great. Cassettes get so much tape hiss to begin with, that adding a sub-par tape player and 20-year-old tapes to that mix guarantees some horrible sounding audio.

If you've got a better deck near your computer, fine. That could work, but you'll still need the aforementioned USB audio capture device if your computer doesn't have audio in. Plus, you'll need the proper software. The Tape 2 PC takes care of all of this for you, providing the USB output and EZ Audio Converter for Mac, which allows you to convert your tapes directly to iTunes. EZ Audio is not the best software out there...in fact, it may be one of the worst choices available (I'd recommend CD Spin Doctor from Roxio or WireTap Studio from Ambrosia), but it'll do the job if you don't want to spend any more.

Once Tape 2 PC is connected to your computer via the provided USB cables, capturing your cassettes is a simple matter of hitting play and on the deck and record on your software. A gain control knob on the back of the deck allows you to control the output level, which is important because you won't be able to do it from within the software; for some reason, the input level control was disabled for the Tape 2 PC in both my sound control panel and CD Spin Doctor. I'd prefer the gain control be easier to access on the Tape 2 PC, which was a complaint I had against the TTUSB10, as well.

So, it's simple to set up and it's simple to use. But how's the sound? It's pretty good, and that's because Ion is treating this not only as a tape deck for your computer, but for your component system, as well. Tape 2 PC has standard RCA component outputs attached permanently to the unit so you can attach it to your stereo receiver, and it contains a single set of uadio inputs in case you want to attach a CD player or receiver.

Up front, Tape 2 PC is a dual deck unit that offers noise reduction, CrO2 playback and recording, and high speed dubbing. An LED meter indicator shows the playbck level, you can adjust the recording level, and one of the decks has a counter. It's pretty much everything you'd expect a tape deck to have at this price level.

I do have a couple of complaints, thought. First, and this is extremely petty, but the lettering on the front of the device is too large and quite ugly. The "TAPE2PC" lettering above deck is especially annoying; almost as bad a car dealership's sticker across your back bumper. To whom is ION advertising at this point?

Obviously, I'm not going to dock the unit for something like that, but a larger concern are the deck control buttons. When hitting play, for example, the other buttons would go down with them, and I'd have to push the button I wanted too far to get it to work. The Tape 2 PC would actually slide backwards because of the force I had to use, so I had to hold it in place while hitting the button I wanted. Everything still worked, but this caused the Tape 2 PC to feel cheap, and using that much force with repeated hits (as when trying to cue up a song or fast forward through a cassette for a particular track) was quite annoying.

And finally, my particular Tape 2 PC unit made an odd humming noise. Not when it was playing, but just sitting there. Off. The only way I could get the noise to stop was by unplugging the unit. Oddly, this never affected the playback quality. It couldn't be heard on the recordings, it was just some kind of mechanical hum. Because I can't verify that anyone else had this problem, it won't affect the rating.

It's a pretty good rating, too. ION Audio's Tape 2 PC, isn't a perfect unit (it does feel a bit cheap in some areas), but it did a great job getting my cassettes onto my computer. I especially like that it's built for both USB and component system use, so it'll continue to have life after you've transferred your tapes to digital audio. I'm not sure the purchase is warranted if that's your only goal (I guess it would depend upon the number of cassettes you need to transfer), but if you need a new tape deck anyway, you should seriously consider the Tape 2 PC.

It would be a better decision than buying cassettes to begin with, after all.