Reshow Cassette Tape Player – Portable Tape Player Audio Cassette to Digital Converter, Compatible with Laptops and Personal Computers Convert Cassette Tape Recorder to iPod Format (Silver)ClimatePartner certified

I was skeptical based on reviews read prior to purchasing. However, I was pleasantly surprised by the ease of use and quality of the cassette converter. The device comes with a USB connector and headphones. The only downside is that the headphones are a really cheap quality, but that didn't make a difference to me as I don't plan to use them. The instruction book comes with steps for using PC or MAC for converting. Directions were simple and easy to follow. Battery life is dependent on batteries or USB plug in. You can use this device for either listening or converting to digital format. Converting to digital format is a lengthy process as you have to listen to the entirety of the song when creating the digital file. The overall functionality of this device is great! I was able to convert a cassette from 1982 and the sound quality wasn't too bad! I recommend this product.

Downloading Audacity was confusing

This has been so fun to work with so far. I've had cassettes I wanted to convert for genealogy research and this was a great tool. I could choose to listen while it was converting or just let it run. The ONLY thing I can say in the negative (and maybe there is a setting I haven't found in Audacity yet) is that if you let the converter run the Audacity software will continue to run even after the Reshow converter has reached the end of the cassette, so I don't recommend leaving it alone for a long time.

But then I suppose, what else should I have expected for the low price. But, as often happens I was persuaded by a 4 and half stars rating. And, it also had "auto-reverse", which most of these cassette units don't have anymore.My first complaint is the door, and how it latches and releases. It is very clumsy and user unfriendly. But, I could have gotten past that, except for as soon as I started recording, the auto reverse kept kicking in, and then it kept changing directions. And it took all of 2 and a half "whole" minutes for this to start happening. And from my long experience years ago, with recording and dubbing cassette tapes and such, I know this malfunction is caused by a weak activator, on the auto reverse mechanism. So, as soon as a tape gets a little age on it, these cheaper units have trouble playing them.The same tape worked fine on my regular tape deck unit. But it does not have auto-reverse, which is very important, if you don't want to have to keep flipping your tapes over by hand, to record side 2.Don't be fooled by the "auto-stop" feature, many of these sellers tout these days. Because they all should have that feature. But these days, few of these cheaper manufacturers are building units with auto reverse, which was once almost a standard feature, back in the 1970's and 80's.But I sure wish someone would build a truly quality unit, for producing mp3 files from cassette tapes. I would gladly pay a hundred or even two hundred dollars, for a descent quality unit. But all that seem to be out there now, with any quality to them, are older, mostly worn out looking machines, ND the sellers are usually asking very exorbitantly high prices for them.And it is such a crying shame, That about all we have to choose from that is new these days, is cheap junk. Because these units might work OK if you have a dozen or 2 dozen tapes to transfer. But I have hundreds of tapes to try to process, so this is getting to be very frustrating for me. (End of Rant :) )

I have so many cassettes that I want to digitize, but I didn't think it was possible for me to do it on my own. Well, with this cassette recorder, I can. Once I downloaded the Audacity software, it was pretty easy to figure out how to transfer my cassette recordings to my laptop. Audacity has many cool features that I would like to learn but don't have the time, so I stuck with the basics. The sound quality is fabulous.

Works really well for digitizing old cassette tapes, but it plays them too fast. I had to adjust the tempo of the outputted audio in GarageBand down from 120 to 115 for it to sound normal. Don't know if this was a flaw with just the one I got or if it's common for all of them, but buyer beware.