DIGITNOW! Portable Cassette Player/Cassette to MP3 Converter Capture Cassette Tape to MP3/CD Audio via USB

Great! Five stars!

I found some old cassette tapes in a box in my loft and wanted to listen to them as they likely contained songs from my youth. Didn't have a tape player so got this as added bonus of being able to connect and record on my PC as needed.PROs- It does it's job, it plays cassettes.- It's cheap.- Arrived quickly and well packaged.- Recognised natively by Windows 10 and 11 (no faffing with setup)CONs- There is a noticeable hiss on playback.- The earphones are very, very cheap and uncomfortable.- USB cable was faulty when arrived - had to use a different one to be recognised on PC.- No power adaptor included- Application included is Audacity, which is free to download online (and made by another company).- Even using brand new high-performance batteries, the playback sounds slightly slower than it should (could be due to age of the tapes though?).Overall, it's not bad - get what you pay for. It does it's job but there will be better units out there or different options. You will need to use Audacity's features to clean up the recordings after transfer.Also noticed a number of other companies selling the exact same product with a different branding so seems to be a generic unit re-sold by numerous retailers.

Nothing special

Truly awful sound quality out of this. I wasn't expecting much, but it's even worse than I imagined. The tape plays too slow and while I don't have the means of measuring it, the wow and flutter sounds truly awful, and I'm not even remotely close to an audiophile. There is also absolutely awful noise on the recording, noticeable during quiet parts of the recording. This noise is noticeable even when playing with no cassette in, so it's clearly from the device, not the tape.The mechanism also feels horribly cheap and nasty. The auto reverse has triggered a few times in the middle of a tape, though that at least seems to have stopped after running through a few tapes, perhaps once everything loosened up a bit. The sound quality however has not improved, and if anything the slowness maybe worse the longer I use it.I have some old tapes and I wanted to find out what's on them - this will do the job of letting me know what's on them, but getting audio which is actually listenable is beyond its abilities.Even allowing for how cheap it is I can't give this more than 1 star - it's just not fit for purpose, and will likely go back for a refund. Sadly it looks like all the similar items available are rebadged versions of the same thing.

The instructions with this indicate that it will set itself up and then you can get straight on using it. However the devil is in the detail. In my case the device was recognized instantly and I did not see any setup phase. It was for that reason that I did not realise that rather than being recognised as "cassette" or something similar Windows recognises it as "USB Microphone". Unfortunately if you then press "play" it you cannot hear it. To do that you need to go into sound devices pick up USB microphone and then change the settings so that you can listen to the device. The bundled software turns out to be Audacity which is freely available and indeed it is better to download the most recent version with any add-ins (if needed) to export the type of music file you are keen to create. Therefore I did not use the supplied CD. To record to Audacity it is worthwhile to go into control panel and suppress all other noises or you may get a bong on the recording from an email pop up or similar. When you start playing the cassette the noise level on the player needs to be set - when I tried it was so loud that the peaks were disappearing off the top of Audacity and there was notable distortion. Reducing the sound level still leaves a certain amount of distortion which is particularly audible on music tracks. Set the sound level and the tape noise will be horrendous with hiss and rumble in the background of every track. Once the sound track has been recorded there will be a fair amount of clean up using the various noise reduction facilities supplied with Audacity. For the price it is what it is, but for a seamless easy to use experience it is not quite there. However, I have obtained some sound recordings which would have been quite difficult to obtain another way (and at reasonable cost).

AN excellent addition to anyone who has audio cassette tapes and wishes to digitise them. I only wish I had more time to finish digitising my very large collection!

This is one of many identical Chinese-manufactured tape-USB packages available. It comes with the player, cable, headphones, and software. It is relatively simple to use and allows conversions of tape recordings to .mp3 format.Well it does, sort of. If you like excessive warble.Quite how a modern factory can make a tape player so bad is a bit of a mystery. I've bought a personal stereo from a car boot sale for 20p that is far superior. I would guess that my particular model may be a result of not uncommon dodgy Chinese quality control, as other reviewers have not mentioned such poor quality playback. In essence, this tape player cannot maintain a steady speed, no matter what age of tape is used. This is great if you want to replicate your 1980s dodgy car stereo, but not great if you want to convert anything other than spoken words. It's like listening to chalk grating down a blackboard. There's also a bit of background hum, although this really doesn't make much difference. Truly awful.The Audacity software supplied is good. It's not 100% intuitive to use straight away, but once familiar it can edit and produce compatible mp3 files. It would help if the player wasn't terrible, but at least some sort of output is created which is better than looking at a tape.Note to self: try out the new toy before the returns window closes.