If you’re anything like me, you have boxes of cassette tapes that aren’t getting use because you either don’t have a cassette player or it isn’t convenient.  But you don’t want to get rid of them, because it’s still good music (or teaching).  In my case, I have piles of Scripture memory tapes that I listened to when I was little that I would really love for my own little ones to hear regularly.  I have a few educational ones, as well, that they could make use of for school.  Unfortunately, we don’t have a player in a primary part of the house that can handle cassettes.  (There is one in my husband’s office, but we don’t want the children in there all the time!)

The obvious solution would be to copy them to CD’s right?  But first you have to have a player.  And then you have to figure out what cable can connect it to the computer – and find that and buy it.  And locate software.  And spend time making sure everything is compatible.

Or you can just buy the Cassette2USB Converter.  I was so excited when I found this.  It’s exactly what I needed!  The converter itself looks a little like a Walkman.  (Remember those?)  It comes with a USB cable to connect it to your computer, and it comes with the software.  Once you have installed the software, all you have to do is put a tape in the converter, plug it in, and press play.  It records to the software and you can save it.  Voila!  That’s it.  (This process will save it as mp3’s.  If you want to burn regular, non-mp3, music CD’s, you’ll then need to convert the file format.  But most current CD players will play mp3’s.)

I found that all of the information I needed about using the converter and software was in the instructions, but I had to read them very closely several times to catch it all.  (There aren’t a lot of instructions, so this is not a matter of reading pages and pages and pages.)  And I had to fiddle with the settings, recording parts of my tape several different times to discover what worked.  (In the end, I learned that I needed to play my tapes with the volume all the way up to get them to record properly.)  But once the adjustments were made, it was pretty easy.  I can set a tape to play/record while I do something else nearby (so I don’t end up with an hour of blank space on the end of my recording when the tape ends and I didn’t know), then stop it and give it my attention only long enough to select and save tracks.

So far, only one hasn’t worked well.  One tape squeaked really badly as it played, and the squeaking recorded.  I have tried it twice and am still having trouble with it, but I’m not done fiddling with it yet.  It is a personal recording and not on  a great quality tape, so I don’t expect to have that problem with any of my commercially-recorded tapes.

I’m looking forward to converting all of the silliness I recorded as a child!  (I actually have a recording that says, “And here’s where you can call to get Money Magazine,” followed by the 800 number.  I think I was enjoying recording and ran out of things to record! lol)

So save your tapes, save some money (it costs less to convert your tapes than to buy all new CD’s), save space (CD’s are more compact than cassettes), and enjoy what you enjoyed listening to before tapes became largely defunct.  (And enjoy being able to listen on a song-by-song basis to things you had to listen to whole albums for before!)

Disclosure: The converter and software were provided to me by the company to facilitate this review.  All opinions are my own.