Plusdeck Review - Get out your cassettes

The interface for the Plusdeck software is pretty simple.  There are control buttons to actually operate the tapedeck (Play side A, Play side B, Fast Forward, Rewind, Pause, Stop, and Eject).  There’s also a place to select the playmode of the tape (continuous loop, one side then stop, or both sides then stop), as well as configure and recording buttons.  Here’s a shot of the interface:

The configuration lets you select default settings for recording audio from your cassettes, including which side to record, the type of file to create (along with bitrate, if necessary), and the number of files to generate.

The default settings were ok for me, so I just exited back to the main menu.  As a test, I wanted to record a few minutes from one of my tapes.  So I clicked the CONVERT button and was greeted with a file dialog.

I typed in ‘tapetest’ and clicked save.  The tape began to play through the speakers, and I listened to it play for a few.  The main window was back in effect, and it showed the counter counting as it played the tape.  The red heading inside the display window didn’t make too much sense, but I knew what it was doing nonetheless.

When I had heard enough, I clicked the stop button (the little square next to the convert button).  This caused the following dialog to appear, as it converted what it had captured into MP3 format.

After about a minute, the audio was encoded and I had an MP3 file sitting on my drive.  I immediately clicked it and was greeted by the music from my tape playing through winamp.

Now that I had my MP3 audio, I decided to take a peek at the WavePad application that came bundled.  I started it up, and loaded my MP3.  I’ll be honest, WavePad is a much more robust application that I would have thought.  After playing with it for a few moments, I found a cool frequency analyzer to show the waveform as the music is playing.  There is a lot you can do with this program to edit your new or even existing MP3 or WAV files. Here’s a quick shot of WavePad in action.

Next: So what is the verdict? >>
 

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