Internet retailer Firebox.com has a couple of interesting products that let you turn an analogue music collection digital. Most recent of the two is the newly arrived Plus Deck Cassette Converter - a £100 auto-reverse audio-cassette player made by BTO. This fits a PC's 5.25in external drive bay and connects using the sound card's line-in to let you capture what's playing.
Capture software is supplied and recordings can be in wav or MP3. Importantly for some, the Plus Deck can also record to cassette from the sound card's line out, letting you put your digital music onto tape.
Although not brand-spanking new, the other product is also well worth a mention. It's a £120 record turntable that connects to a PC via USB.
That way, there's no need to mess around bringing together your hi-fi system and PC and buying a pre-amp to do it - two things that have put us off trying any of the converter boxes that have been available for a good few years.
Firebox calls the product the USB Turntable but it looks to be a badged version of the ION iTTUSB (of which the maker markets another variant under its Numark brand as the TTUSB).
The thinking behind the two products, of course, is that anyone with even a half-reasonable collection of LPs and music cassettes is going to have to pay a small fortune if they buy that music again on CD or as downloads that play on iPods or other portable music players.
[advert]
You'll not have failed to notice that buying both of Firebox's offerings means spending £220 - and that's not a pittance.
But what we'd do, being tight-wads, is try to legally recoup some of the cost - by buying 'em, using 'em and then flogging 'em once the job was done. However folk with large collections of analogue music would still be quids in if they kept both.
Thoughts on converting your analogue music to digital? Share them with us in this thread in the HEXUS.lifestyle.news forum.
HEXUS.links
HEXUS.community :: discussion thread about this articleExternal.links
Firebox - home pageFirebox - Plus Deck Cassette Converter buying page
Firebox - USB turntable buying page
BTO Plus Deck 2 - home page
BTO Plus Deck 2 - manual (PDF - 1.03MByte. Left-click to view, right-click to download)
ION - iTTUSB home page
Numark - home page
Numark - support page (for link to TTUSB quick-start guide - 1.19MByte PDF)
