Bro, you're probably never reading this but today I need to share something with you... For the past 2 years I've been struggling with depression, i work too many hours and I spend my weekends usually alone, however every Friday I like to cook something good, relax and have dinner watching your videos and content... I'm not even American but I wish someday I could thank you in person for helping me survive week after week, recently things have been going better for me and that's why I wanted to share. Thank you so much LGR
How are things going now? I hope things are at least a bit better now. I don't have depression so much as anxiety and I definitely got a lot to be anxious about. T_T
@@ashkitt7719 they have gotten better, I got a better job; moved out to a different place and found a significant other! Thank you for asking, I hope you go over the anxiety issue, it is possible
I actually have a 2c and the software works perfectly on Windows 11 with a good ol’ USB to serial converter and a usb sound card. I actually quite like it. It’s cool listening to all my dads old classic rock tapes through my pc while I work.
As much as an audiophile my pop was, he still had his old Sony dual tape deck wired into his computer with some proprietary software he had for his cassettes, but had an ION record player that was also wired in, and this.... This would have been a godsend to him... RIP pop, hope I'll get your reel to reel working someday soon and can play your reels soon
The way he did it is always better than garbage like this. It is made to cash in on nostalgia and its made cheap for idiots that don't know what they are doing. Proper recording media with good quality hardware and connections is all you need.
I'd love to see a beige large server tower filled with all these oddware 5 1/4" drive bays.. speaker... crt...cig lighter..vu meter ... would be great!
personally i'm looking for an audio interface that goes into a 5-1/4" bay. i want to get a nice boom mic but its weird there's no market for internal interafaces.
@@zfoxfire you can get a car stereo equalizer to fit in there, but all you need to do is route the mic and input sockets from the back, to the front. If you have a spare bay it's easy peasy to pop the cover off, drill some holes in it and mount the jack sockets, and then solder small diameter coax cable and either connect that with the optional 4 pin analog in/out on the card, or simply jack plugs and plug them into the soundcard at the back. OR you could just get some 3.5 mm male-female extension leads, and not even have to open the PC. Me, i would take the longer route, LOL
Yeah the retro tech youtubers pretty much love sucking each others dicks xD the Synthesizer and Camera TH-camrs are kinda the same. Though not THAT extreme.
He was far from the first to do the "give free cassettes to your TH-camr buddies" thing, just arguably the highest profile and most successful person to do it.
I just finished tearing down a VW Gamma Stereo from the late 90s/Early 2000s for a full refurb. That mechanism looks near 1:1 with the one from the VW (which I believe was based on a Sony Design) even down to the belt layout, and the ribbon cable usage and placement. Kinda wanna find one of these for my Win 2000 system now. Really enjoyed finding out this was even a thing.
I think it may be Sony, or Philips, but it's probably Sony that made it. This mechanism is of very good quality and is very well built. PD: It is probably designed and manufactured in Korea, since it uses a lot of Samyoung capacitors.
I think the recording version would have been AWESOME in the early 2000s. In 2000, almost all cars still had tape players. Recording them was a kind of lengthy process (setting up the deck, adjusting the level, preparing a playlist, monitoring it). With this you should have been able ( not sure how they implemented the S/W) to just drag a few files on the App, it should be possible to automatically arrange them for best use of both sides (in theory it should even be able to apply EQ by recording test tones to the tape, rewinding, and then auto adjust the sound output EQ), click go and just walk away / do something else on the PC. Would be super convenient for quick tape recordings to be later used in a car. Almost like an analog flash drive.
I was thinking the exact same thing 🤔 I was still rockin' a cassette deck in my car until the late 2000s, and was still making mix tapes. I'd try to fill the tapes end to end so there was little to no "dead air" at the end of either side, which wasn't always easy. Software could definitely automate the whole process by arranging the songs in the best order to reduce or eliminate dead air at the ends of the tape. The only slight problem is that not all blank tapes are equal in length. Most manufacturers load more tape than a label indicates, for example 90 meters (300 feet) rather than 86 meters (282 feet) of tape for a C60 cassette, and 132 or 135 meters (433 or 443 feet) rather than 129 meters (423 feet) of tape for a C90 cassette, providing an extra minute or two of playback time per side
@@elmoredneal5382 The software could check the length of the tape before laying it down. All it needs to do is run it to both ends real fast. If the tape deck was high enough quality it wouldn't even need to go to both ends. It could get a pretty good estimate of the exact length of the tape by just fast forwarding a little bit. When the pickup spool gets larger the other side gets smaller. With some math you can figure out how long the tape should be pretty qucikly by the change in speed ratio between the spools.
@@the_kombinator Is there a difference between line-in and microphone? What about line-in/mic combo ports? I've been looking at converting some cassette tapes but it sounds like a hundred cicadas in the background. Apparently mic jacks on computers are too sensitive, does that apply to line-in/mic combo ports?
@@the_kombinator Also there was that thing that was a cassette with a cable coming out of it to connect to a Discman. Put the cassette in the car player and there you go! Oh the 90s/noughties!
@@annaquay4183 I mainly use a laptop that is marked as mic but obviously works as line-in too, but I've got a small form-factor desktop PC that is marked as combo line-in and mic. I just wondered if there was an actual difference or whether the ports just have different markings.
Jesus, the 21" CRT in the background. I knew it was big in the video he posted about it, but now that it's in a proper scale with other computers and stuff on the tables....holy dang.
Also odd that it appearantly records in 44.1KHz 8 bit stereo. Did a quick calculation because when you played that clicky WAV recording in Winamp, it showed 705kbps where it should have been 1411.
I caught that discrepancy too. That would also explain the resulting audio quality issues and why the other program (which almost certainly recorded at 16-bit) recorded just fine.
Ooh fascinating indeed, didn't notice that. Could very explain the bad recordings made through the Plusdeck software. All of the other audio programs I tried here recorded in 44.1KHz 16-bit stereo and those sounded perfect, so I think you're onto something!
@@LGR As I understand it bit dept in PCM audio mostly affects the SNR (signal to noise ratio) of the digital audio, given that this thing can only handle type 1 cassette tapes without noise reduction 8bit PCM might be all you really need. So I think this is down to how the sound card or the Windows sound subsystem converts to 8bit. 8bit 44.1KHz audio can sound pretty good, but reducing the bit-depth in Sound Recorder on early versions of Windows always resulted in clicky, poppy audio like this when I tried it. I'd suggest trying it in a different soundcard or an XP machine, if you care to. You did ask for a reason to get this out again in the video : ).
I was also thinking maybe the system audio settings were set to 48kHz, and the software was trying to record at 44.1, I get that issue sometimes recording into audacity at a sample rate that's different from my sound card setting
I'd like to see someone build a 2000-2005ish tower, big as it can be, with maxed out 5.25 slots of all the silly items, all functional. That would be impressive.
Too bad I don't have a picture of my old PC. That's exactly what I did. A full Tower case with the lighter, the cassette deck, a zip drive, 2 optical drives, a removable HDD tray and a status board. I also had a SuperDisc and a I/O breakout in the 3.5 slots. It cracked me up and the lighter is particularly good for lighting a one-hitter bat.
Man I'm still fascinated by this older tech but I come here because we're similar in age but Clint has a lot more patience than I do these days for things to work only after a lot of troubleshooting. My first hand-me-down windows pc was a DX-33 which my brother insisted I assemble myself. Was glad he did because it inspired me to develop a competency with computers that I still enjoy today, however today I don't have alot of free time to tinker & overcome challenges. Goddamn work life.
@@blackterminal It may be gunk on the read head of the player (a relatively easy fix, with some isopropyl alcohol and cotton bud to clean). Or it could be misalignment of the heads in the player, which I've heard is a difficult problem to solve as it requires precise adjustment of the read head...
as someone who tries to get and keep original head units in vintage cars, I'd love to had a tape drive capable of recording tapes in my PC. Sure, there are cassette-shaped devices that allows to plug a modern MP3 player or phone using a jack or bluetooth in a deck, but having a collection of real home-recorded mix tapes (that magically convert into Best Of Queen) is the real vintage experience.
It never crossed my mind that something like this would exist. My car still has a cassette player, I bought my favourite modern album (Dave - were all alone in this together) and it came on cassette, record and CD
my car (2000 corolla) still has its cassette player and it plays all the cassettes I have right at the moment I stopped playing them 20 years ago :) I never had the desire to change it... cassettes are just fine for cars.
Honestly a better option nowadays might be one of those magic bluetooth cassettes, a cheap option that updates your car stereo without having to totally replace it completely
Pretty cool. There are still modern day solutions for this but the retro factor is great. Love those old Roland speakers. I always wanted a pair of those back in the day.
@@bacongl I mean, some have one or two, but you don't have to use brand new cases. I run an antec 900, that things *all* front bays, but still with as much airflow as I could ever want. imo, pc cases peaked in that era, other than the... uh... lets say minimalist cable management options. But theres solutions for that too.
I'm excited to see you get your hands on one of these. A few years ago I rebuilt a PC for a friend and he wanted to recycle this part. Recently I was doing an upgrade and he decided to give this to me!
I remember back in the day in my childhood when microcenter used to have an aisle of all the strange crap you review on oddware. Late 90s and early 2000s were a beautiful time for computers
@Max I wish it was like that still. Such an amazingly inovative time! I was born in 1990, so I was still a child then, and was just happy that the game would run at 20fps so I could play it lol. I remember 64 megabytes of ram costing 250$ around 2001 lol 😆
I did use a cassette deck and a computer, through a home made a adapter, to digitize my cassettes. I never knew such a thing as this existed. That is actually true of many of the things you show us. If someone were to try to build something like that today, they would have a problem getting quality cassette mechanisms. As far as I know, there is only one company making cassette mechanisms now and they are poor quality. Anyway, it is a neat device.
I'm probably not the first to think this, but I bet this thing could be pretty handy for use in archiving old computer tapes. Since it's serial, the protocol should be fairly simple to reverse engineer, so one could ditch the Plusdeck native software (probably a good thing, as it appears that the software is causing glitches in the recording) and write an open source app to control the deck and manage the recording (setting the sound card to highest quality of course.) Might even be possible to programatically monitor the audio stream as it's being recorded so as to detect blank/silent spots (so that tapes with multiple programs on them can be automagically split into separate files) and maybe even somehow decode the audio stream in order to automagically detect the filenames. (this latter would be tricky but doable I think.) Might have to pick up one of these at some point. Of course, if they are being used for retro archiving, the prices of these things have probably gone through the roof by now. :-P
I thought that was what this thing was, until I watched the video. I would be more interested in a tape drive for 5-1/4" bay. I'd have no idea where to start in reverse engineering this thing to copy data, but that would be really cool.
Given it's all serial you should be able to sniff out the serial commands as they are sent over the com port, then just write the control program in your favourite language to spit out and receive the commands and status signals.
I have a bunch of old computer data cassettes I want to be able to read, but not sure how. I have a Texas Instruments data tape deck that is made for data cassettes but without any sort of input I/O not sure how to find out the info on the cassettes.
I've had one of these for yeas now, and its true, under windows 98, it doesn't seem to work as well. I bought mine about 12 years ago, and have had it installed in several vintage boxes, but about three years ago I put it in an old Dell Dimension desktop, with windows XP. Somewhere along the line I found some updated drivers for it, not even sure I still have them! Upon installing them, I found it works perfectly! I've had a continuing project, off and on now for several years converting some 500 cassettes from my late Father, and it has just kept doing what I needed for it to do! Nice to see that you found this, and did a great review!
I was unable to make mine work many years ago, but i will revisit it thanks to your video. You have given me new information about it. I am planing to build a XP retro Audio PC.
3:38 As someone who used to smoke and work/game back in the day, lighting your cigarette with a conveniently placed lighter that's right there in the case would have been such a killer thing to have. I'd almost have to say that's the drive bay freakshow that would have had the MOST real-world application purely by definition.
I'm not convinced. Why not just plug your walkman (or other tap deck) into your computer a record? Over $200 (with inflation) for this device seems nonsensical TBH
@@repatch43 Its the older version that appeals to me more, the idea that you could record your music from PC to tape deck that easily, mind you again its not hard to just run an aux to a recorder but maybe its more convient if you do it alot
For probably less than half of that money back in the day you could just get a cheap boombox with a cassette deck and a line-in that was more versatile than this. But this is most certainly way more awesome with the 'digital controls'. I have 2 of these in fact (the old ones, with the record button) just for that reason! I knew about these back then, but it was too gimmicky to actually consider buying for the price.
LOL I went out to cash converters and bought a 3 head Yamaha tape deck (still have it) for like $20 and connected it to line in. I don't see why you'd need to spend 8x that to install a (likely) shitty head built into a small bay. This is a gimmick, not a usable product.
@@the_kombinator I suppose most people who bought one of these did so for the convenience of being able to control all the processes directly from your computer, as apposed to having to manually do it...
@@Quickened1 Yes, and it was such a success that the company made only one product SMH. Also, you press one button (play) on the tape player and let Audacity record everything from the tape, then separate the tracks manually after the tape ends. This is exactly how I did it with Win 98. Paying $160 for the "convenience" of not having to physically press a button is simply retarded and a waste of money. The device itself is an interesting topic to cover, but from a technical standpoint it is useless, there's no target market, and the quality of the thing seems low.
Honestly you can accomplish the same thing still, just buy a cassette deck and an RCA to aux cable. Most PC cases don't even have space for drives now anyway
@@TheAbandonedAccount7 I know you can do this. It's easy to hookup a decent Walkman for a similar experience. But I like the idea of it being just there. Obviously my case and pretty much 90% of cases these days can't fit such things and they look ugly. Would've been neat to see a modernised version of it.
I have one and put it in my Windows XP gaming rig that I built to look like a LAN party PC from 2006. It's got all the obnoxious neon lights and the alien-like tower case and all the neon colored hardware and motherboards that flash strobe lights. Can play cassettes while smashing in Unreal Tournament or Quake. @@SmoothEmJay
This is a pretty cool gadget. Just wanted to mention that because it's controlled via RS-232, it should be easy to intercept the data and reverse-engineer the protocol, so you can replace their broken software. SysInternals have a free utility called PortMon that I've used to do just that kind of thing before. 🐱
Bro your video quality has improved like crazy since I was last on your channel! Always a pleasure coming back here and seeing how much you've grown. Stay awesome!
I probably would have had bought one of these for my pc back then had I known they existed. Still a good idea if you have an old tape collection that you want to upgrade to a more modern cd/digital format. Nice video.
back in the days i used to stuff all the gadgets i got into my pc. i also stumbled across this plusdeck, but here in europe they were absurd expensive! i think there was also a tape bay you could store data on! Like a backup tape, but with normal audiotapes.
I really, really wish you one day stumble upon 3.5" CD-RW (yes, you read that right), 8 cm recorder I saw years ago in one of my clients' PCs. He said it came as a bundle (two products bought together, not in the same box) with his CD-RW based video camera, and used normal IDE interface, same as LS-120 internal drives did. I even had written down maker & model, but the scrap of paper is long gone.
18:46 That's a 4-track head, it's a neater way to do auto-reverse instead of having a rotating tape head. It does make it harder to do recording but since that isn't a feature here, it's the more reliable option.
Man, do I have the perfect pairing for this! I've been hanging onto an item for years since I've never seen another one. It's a PCI-card FM-Tuner for Windows 3.1 but it also works on 95, 98 and 2k. Yes, you too can now listen to the FM radio on your PC with this funky little gadget. I still have the card, and the 3.5" floppy with the program to run it.
Glad to see Incesticide getting some love. Clint, you would probably love the "Grunge Lite" muzak album from 1993 if you haven't heard it before. It's grunge hits redone in a muzak/midi style. I have the whole album on my channel if you're interested.
Thats an intresting looking audio coverter! i never seen such thing! i wonder if an 5.25'' PC record player also exist haha! and do wanna note. you got an good music taste! epic to see that ELO secret messages & pink floyd momentary lapse of reason in the collecting!
I need to take a second to say how awesome it is that you not only own Nevermind on cassette, but also Incesticide, Bleach, Remanufacture, and The Real thing as well. Good choices
years prior when cd roms were new and very expensive and napster was just getting popular, I hooked up a woodgrain cassette recorded from a component stereo to our family pc. I would make mixtapes from the mp3s I downloaded (on dial up). What a time.
I love this device I picked one up in 2012 pretty cheap it is great that I could play my tapes again and make a lot of my collecting into mp3's. I used it with win 7 with no issues at all.
At 3:30 nice... I still have Nevermind and Incesticide on cassette too! (Bleach, I could only get in CD back then here in Argentina, and had to as the only friend I had with a CD player to transfer it to a cassette for me 🙂)
I've had my eye out for one of these for a long ass time! You just don't see them! Would be a lovely addition to the 98 rig so I can listen to my Prodigy tapes while playing Unreal. ❤
I had this or a similar thing. had a tape deck in my car for a pretty simple reason: It was in the age of loud stereos and the subwoofers in the back of the car would make a cd player skip mercilessly when turned up, tapes however were fine. The headunit had a cd changer attached as well, but i had to burn them bass tests to tape.
For automating reading C64 tapes this would be ideal! A simple python script to send serial commands and read audio from soundcard is all you'd need. Someone may have already written something...
A buddy of mine had a marvelous Cd-Rom drive around 1998-2000. It was a 4 Cd's drive, you could put one in, press a button, the drive stashed it, and insert another Cd. You switched from one and other with a button, took about 30 seconds and voilá. Haven't seen one of those ever since.
I can’t believe there was even a demand for something like this in 2006! Even I had moved on from cassettes by then with the advent of CDR drives and Limewire. I can’t believe something like this existed a year after I graduated 😂
I remember seeing stuff like this for VHS tapes in my late teens at like best buy. I guess the demand was for being able to archive your media like your home videotapes and recordings so they wouldn't be lost to time with the new century.
Actually not so much, seeing as it records through line in anyway, it would be better to get a higher quality tape deck and use it instead. This can't handle anything other than type 1 tapes, no DNR, and if you get one that played too fast you can't fix it.
Well if they're converting it to the new age, they might want to grab a PC that isn't 20 years old. Which means no drive bays. Which means, just get a deck + RCA to aux cord and use your PCs line in/audacity.
That looks like a pretty decent quality cassette mechanism, unlike what you'd find in present-day machines that all rely on the same cheap basic design full of plastic parts. I refer to Techmoan for the relevant videos of course :)
I would love to see a serial capture wedge between the PC serial port and the Plusdeck 2 to see what the serial commands are that are sent to it. I could see some interesting python or other custom capture software written for it. :D
Even more so with the recording version. You could write some code to completely automate the recording precess (including efficient use of both tape sides, automatic and very precise equalisation (as the software could use test tones to calibrate to the cassette). Basically that would make the tape almost like an analog flash drive for music transfer.
I still love cassettes. I wish they’d make a full-fledged come back like records did. Be nice if we could get some high-quality blanks these days and some recorders and prerecorded tapes with Dolby.
Clint that cdrom is extremely nostalgic to me. First computer of ours that my mom let me take apart had that same Toshiba drive. I believe it was 24x. Always makes me happy to see one!
Seeing you refer to your earlier graphic eq and cigarette lighter videos, I was wondering if it were possible to get a pc case that was all 5 1/4 bays at the front that could be used as a ‘sidecar’ that could be hooked up to your other PCs as some kind of ‘audio odd ware monster’ !?
I would have found this very useful, back in the day. I had loads of cassette tapes I could have digitised, if the idea had occurred to me at the time. Alas, it didn't, due in large to not knowing about it until now. Unfortunately, it's about 23 years too late to do anything about it! Although, that price tag would have put me off. Also, there's a far cheaper way I could have done the same thing, if I'd wanted to.
You can simply hook any tape deck up to the line in and digitize tapes. As a plus you can even record tapes if you want to make mixes, and you can select the proper noise reduction. While this is very neat, it's sort of a gimmick simply because it's an extremely basic tape player.
@@volvo09 Thats what I'm doing right now, have about 20 old tapes my dad and his band recorded back in the day, using my old Technics dual deck player straight into the PC using Audacity. Its not a quick process, but better than waiting for the tapes to degrade
My brother would've found this useful back in the day. He does have hardware that is similar if not better than this, but the fact that this existed years ago is still amazing. In fact I think 3:21 is the model that he uses when editing old audio tape recordings and storing them in his PC.
I was the engineer who repaired this product.
It's a new feeling to see it after so much time has passed.
Probably nostalgic 👍
How's Taiwan?
@@trueKENTUCKY no korean
Did you work for BTO?
@@cothfi Yes
Bro, you're probably never reading this but today I need to share something with you... For the past 2 years I've been struggling with depression, i work too many hours and I spend my weekends usually alone, however every Friday I like to cook something good, relax and have dinner watching your videos and content... I'm not even American but I wish someday I could thank you in person for helping me survive week after week, recently things have been going better for me and that's why I wanted to share. Thank you so much LGR
I’m glad to hear these videos are a positive thing :)
Hope things continue getting better and better!
How are things going now? I hope things are at least a bit better now.
I don't have depression so much as anxiety and I definitely got a lot to be anxious about. T_T
@@ashkitt7719 they have gotten better, I got a better job; moved out to a different place and found a significant other! Thank you for asking, I hope you go over the anxiety issue, it is possible
@@ashkitt7719 everything has moved forward in a positive way! Thank you so much
I'm shocked the record industry survived this technological marvel.
5.25” tape recording is killing music! 🏴☠️
LGR killed the radio star.
@@LGR ah the good ol 1980s slogan. I can already picture the cassette crossbones logo.
PC taping is skill in music!
@@Arehexes now it’s mp4 killed the radio star.😂😢😅😂😢😅
I actually have a 2c and the software works perfectly on Windows 11 with a good ol’ USB to serial converter and a usb sound card. I actually quite like it. It’s cool listening to all my dads old classic rock tapes through my pc while I work.
Is it worth it over USB capturing off a deck?
@@caseystrange if you have a 5.25 drive bay then yeah. But this isn’t USB, you have to have a soundcard or audio interface to capture its output
I half expected Techmoan to pop out of the woodgrain at some point. Always love an oddware episode!
Maybe he'd be able to identify the mechanism - might be useful to prompt him?
well, he did mention that at some point the belts will "perish", soooo
Nah, not enough puppets lol
Oh, Techmoan will be in comments soon enough.
@@microbuilder there has been a depressing lack of puppets lately
As much as an audiophile my pop was, he still had his old Sony dual tape deck wired into his computer with some proprietary software he had for his cassettes, but had an ION record player that was also wired in, and this.... This would have been a godsend to him... RIP pop, hope I'll get your reel to reel working someday soon and can play your reels soon
I'm sorry you lost your Dad..I lost my Mum a few years ago and it's still terribly painful.
> "audiophile"
> "Dual tape deck"
> "Audiophile"
Lolwut
@@TheAbandonedAccount7 not mutually exclusive bro
The way he did it is always better than garbage like this. It is made to cash in on nostalgia and its made cheap for idiots that don't know what they are doing. Proper recording media with good quality hardware and connections is all you need.
I'd love to see a beige large server tower filled with all these oddware 5 1/4" drive bays.. speaker... crt...cig lighter..vu meter ... would be great!
I've been advocating for him to build a retro "hifi" tower just to showcase what was available
personally i'm looking for an audio interface that goes into a 5-1/4" bay. i want to get a nice boom mic but its weird there's no market for internal interafaces.
I could build one, how about a 5 1/4 inch bay with a huge led clock in there as well?. I love that tape deck, i want one, i want one!😆
@@zfoxfire you can get a car stereo equalizer to fit in there, but all you need to do is route the mic and input sockets from the back, to the front. If you have a spare bay it's easy peasy to pop the cover off, drill some holes in it and mount the jack sockets, and then solder small diameter coax cable and either connect that with the optional 4 pin analog in/out on the card, or simply jack plugs and plug them into the soundcard at the back. OR you could just get some 3.5 mm male-female extension leads, and not even have to open the PC. Me, i would take the longer route, LOL
Don't forget the minidisc drive (bay) also! LOL.
Man, a cup holder AND a tape deck? This thing has all the features!
Those were selling points if you were buying a new car back in the day XD
Got to pair it with the drive bay speakers too. With enough bays one could convert their PC tower into a home stereo.
Just needs electric windows... Wait...
@@celebraces2 Underrated comment.
Be sure the cup holder isn't really a CD-ROM tray!
Man, Anders Enger Jenson sure knows how to play the game. He gets so much free publicity from pretty much every retro/tech TH-camr around.
Literally watched lgr and techmoan randomly today and saw his music being used
Yeah the retro tech youtubers pretty much love sucking each others dicks xD the Synthesizer and Camera TH-camrs are kinda the same. Though not THAT extreme.
Anders needs to get more copies of his sold out albums back in stock. I want a copy but I can't get it.
He was far from the first to do the "give free cassettes to your TH-camr buddies" thing, just arguably the highest profile and most successful person to do it.
@@awesomeferret Not sure how you got the impression that I was suggesting that he invented the concept, but okay.
I just finished tearing down a VW Gamma Stereo from the late 90s/Early 2000s for a full refurb. That mechanism looks near 1:1 with the one from the VW (which I believe was based on a Sony Design) even down to the belt layout, and the ribbon cable usage and placement.
Kinda wanna find one of these for my Win 2000 system now. Really enjoyed finding out this was even a thing.
I think it may be Sony, or Philips, but it's probably Sony that made it. This mechanism is of very good quality and is very well built. PD: It is probably designed and manufactured in Korea, since it uses a lot of Samyoung capacitors.
Ahh...digital and analog going hand in hand in harmony. What a beautiful sound to behold.
Play that funky music!
I think the recording version would have been AWESOME in the early 2000s. In 2000, almost all cars still had tape players. Recording them was a kind of lengthy process (setting up the deck, adjusting the level, preparing a playlist, monitoring it).
With this you should have been able ( not sure how they implemented the S/W) to just drag a few files on the App, it should be possible to automatically arrange them for best use of both sides (in theory it should even be able to apply EQ by recording test tones to the tape, rewinding, and then auto adjust the sound output EQ), click go and just walk away / do something else on the PC. Would be super convenient for quick tape recordings to be later used in a car. Almost like an analog flash drive.
You could still write software to do that. Some people are saying that cassettes are making a comeback.
Bad quality tho..
@@eric_d and why wouldn't they?
I was thinking the exact same thing 🤔 I was still rockin' a cassette deck in my car until the late 2000s, and was still making mix tapes. I'd try to fill the tapes end to end so there was little to no "dead air" at the end of either side, which wasn't always easy.
Software could definitely automate the whole process by arranging the songs in the best order to reduce or eliminate dead air at the ends of the tape.
The only slight problem is that not all blank tapes are equal in length. Most manufacturers load more tape than a label indicates, for example 90 meters (300 feet) rather than 86 meters (282 feet) of tape for a C60 cassette, and 132 or 135 meters (433 or 443 feet) rather than 129 meters (423 feet) of tape for a C90 cassette, providing an extra minute or two of playback time per side
@@elmoredneal5382 The software could check the length of the tape before laying it down. All it needs to do is run it to both ends real fast. If the tape deck was high enough quality it wouldn't even need to go to both ends. It could get a pretty good estimate of the exact length of the tape by just fast forwarding a little bit. When the pickup spool gets larger the other side gets smaller. With some math you can figure out how long the tape should be pretty qucikly by the change in speed ratio between the spools.
I had this and it was AMAZING. Being able to convert my jam tapes to MP3 was a game changer back in the day!
You know you could 3.5mm on a decent walkman into line in, right? Better quality and cheaper.
@@the_kombinator Is there a difference between line-in and microphone? What about line-in/mic combo ports? I've been looking at converting some cassette tapes but it sounds like a hundred cicadas in the background. Apparently mic jacks on computers are too sensitive, does that apply to line-in/mic combo ports?
@@FlyboyHelosim I'm guessing you've tried the 'back' line-in on your PC - it may not be a combined one like the 'front/top' line-in/mic combo?
@@the_kombinator Also there was that thing that was a cassette with a cable coming out of it to connect to a Discman. Put the cassette in the car player and there you go! Oh the 90s/noughties!
@@annaquay4183 I mainly use a laptop that is marked as mic but obviously works as line-in too, but I've got a small form-factor desktop PC that is marked as combo line-in and mic. I just wondered if there was an actual difference or whether the ports just have different markings.
Jesus, the 21" CRT in the background. I knew it was big in the video he posted about it, but now that it's in a proper scale with other computers and stuff on the tables....holy dang.
Also odd that it appearantly records in 44.1KHz 8 bit stereo. Did a quick calculation because when you played that clicky WAV recording in Winamp, it showed 705kbps where it should have been 1411.
I caught that discrepancy too. That would also explain the resulting audio quality issues and why the other program (which almost certainly recorded at 16-bit) recorded just fine.
Ooh fascinating indeed, didn't notice that. Could very explain the bad recordings made through the Plusdeck software. All of the other audio programs I tried here recorded in 44.1KHz 16-bit stereo and those sounded perfect, so I think you're onto something!
@@LGR As I understand it bit dept in PCM audio mostly affects the SNR (signal to noise ratio) of the digital audio, given that this thing can only handle type 1 cassette tapes without noise reduction 8bit PCM might be all you really need. So I think this is down to how the sound card or the Windows sound subsystem converts to 8bit. 8bit 44.1KHz audio can sound pretty good, but reducing the bit-depth in Sound Recorder on early versions of Windows always resulted in clicky, poppy audio like this when I tried it. I'd suggest trying it in a different soundcard or an XP machine, if you care to. You did ask for a reason to get this out again in the video : ).
@@cutchyacokov I would agree, but that didn't sound anything like clipping
I was also thinking maybe the system audio settings were set to 48kHz, and the software was trying to record at 44.1, I get that issue sometimes recording into audacity at a sample rate that's different from my sound card setting
I'd like to see someone build a 2000-2005ish tower, big as it can be, with maxed out 5.25 slots of all the silly items, all functional. That would be impressive.
Yea with one of those internal bay mounted vga monitors that LGR had on here as well!
Too bad I don't have a picture of my old PC. That's exactly what I did. A full Tower case with the lighter, the cassette deck, a zip drive, 2 optical drives, a removable HDD tray and a status board. I also had a SuperDisc and a I/O breakout in the 3.5 slots. It cracked me up and the lighter is particularly good for lighting a one-hitter bat.
Man I'm still fascinated by this older tech but I come here because we're similar in age but Clint has a lot more patience than I do these days for things to work only after a lot of troubleshooting. My first hand-me-down windows pc was a DX-33 which my brother insisted I assemble myself. Was glad he did because it inspired me to develop a competency with computers that I still enjoy today, however today I don't have alot of free time to tinker & overcome challenges. Goddamn work life.
You brought me way back when I saw the icons on your desktop! I played tons of NFS2, Duke Nukem and Carmageddon.
As a cassette collector I was always curious about these!
Do you know what causes a tape to play dim on one channel and louder on the other?
@@blackterminal It may be gunk on the read head of the player (a relatively easy fix, with some isopropyl alcohol and cotton bud to clean). Or it could be misalignment of the heads in the player, which I've heard is a difficult problem to solve as it requires precise adjustment of the read head...
i have one of these! mine doesnt work for some unknown reason tho.
as someone who tries to get and keep original head units in vintage cars, I'd love to had a tape drive capable of recording tapes in my PC.
Sure, there are cassette-shaped devices that allows to plug a modern MP3 player or phone using a jack or bluetooth in a deck, but having a collection of real home-recorded mix tapes (that magically convert into Best Of Queen) is the real vintage experience.
It never crossed my mind that something like this would exist. My car still has a cassette player, I bought my favourite modern album (Dave - were all alone in this together) and it came on cassette, record and CD
I wish my car still had its original cassette deck.
my car (2000 corolla) still has its cassette player and it plays all the cassettes I have right at the moment I stopped playing them 20 years ago :) I never had the desire to change it... cassettes are just fine for cars.
Honestly a better option nowadays might be one of those magic bluetooth cassettes, a cheap option that updates your car stereo without having to totally replace it completely
@@bepowerification mine is a 2002 Nissan Micra k11, in century green 😁
@@9852323 I was lucky that mine had the original unit because most of the later models of my car had a CD player optioned
Wow I sent that item to you years ago! Just saw this and I was like "naah, couldn't be... it IS!". Thanks for the shoutout :)
I desperately wanted one of these back in the day, they were definitely expensive by kid standards
Pretty cool. There are still modern day solutions for this but the retro factor is great. Love those old Roland speakers. I always wanted a pair of those back in the day.
yeah, but can the modern solutions fit in an optical bay? I didn't think so.
@@curvingfyre6810 But do cases even have optical bays anymore.
@@bacongl I mean, some have one or two, but you don't have to use brand new cases. I run an antec 900, that things *all* front bays, but still with as much airflow as I could ever want. imo, pc cases peaked in that era, other than the... uh... lets say minimalist cable management options. But theres solutions for that too.
I bet those speakers cost a fortune back in the day. Probably still worth a bit now.
I'm excited to see you get your hands on one of these. A few years ago I rebuilt a PC for a friend and he wanted to recycle this part. Recently I was doing an upgrade and he decided to give this to me!
You always find the best oddware
Glad you said what BTO stood for.
Almost thought Bachman Turner Overdrive got into the PC peripheral business for a second.
I remember back in the day in my childhood when microcenter used to have an aisle of all the strange crap you review on oddware. Late 90s and early 2000s were a beautiful time for computers
@Max I wish it was like that still. Such an amazingly inovative time! I was born in 1990, so I was still a child then, and was just happy that the game would run at 20fps so I could play it lol. I remember 64 megabytes of ram costing 250$ around 2001 lol 😆
I did use a cassette deck and a computer, through a home made a adapter, to digitize my cassettes. I never knew such a thing as this existed. That is actually true of many of the things you show us. If someone were to try to build something like that today, they would have a problem getting quality cassette mechanisms. As far as I know, there is only one company making cassette mechanisms now and they are poor quality. Anyway, it is a neat device.
I'm probably not the first to think this, but I bet this thing could be pretty handy for use in archiving old computer tapes. Since it's serial, the protocol should be fairly simple to reverse engineer, so one could ditch the Plusdeck native software (probably a good thing, as it appears that the software is causing glitches in the recording) and write an open source app to control the deck and manage the recording (setting the sound card to highest quality of course.) Might even be possible to programatically monitor the audio stream as it's being recorded so as to detect blank/silent spots (so that tapes with multiple programs on them can be automagically split into separate files) and maybe even somehow decode the audio stream in order to automagically detect the filenames. (this latter would be tricky but doable I think.) Might have to pick up one of these at some point. Of course, if they are being used for retro archiving, the prices of these things have probably gone through the roof by now. :-P
I thought that was what this thing was, until I watched the video. I would be more interested in a tape drive for 5-1/4" bay. I'd have no idea where to start in reverse engineering this thing to copy data, but that would be really cool.
Given it's all serial you should be able to sniff out the serial commands as they are sent over the com port, then just write the control program in your favourite language to spit out and receive the commands and status signals.
I have a bunch of old computer data cassettes I want to be able to read, but not sure how. I have a Texas Instruments data tape deck that is made for data cassettes but without any sort of input I/O not sure how to find out the info on the cassettes.
I've had one of these for yeas now, and its true, under windows 98, it doesn't seem to work as well. I bought mine about 12 years ago, and have had it installed in several vintage boxes, but about three years ago I put it in an old Dell Dimension desktop, with windows XP. Somewhere along the line I found some updated drivers for it, not even sure I still have them! Upon installing them, I found it works perfectly! I've had a continuing project, off and on now for several years converting some 500 cassettes from my late Father, and it has just kept doing what I needed for it to do! Nice to see that you found this, and did a great review!
Neat! 😅 Man, I gotta finish this new album I have in mind… lots of useful computer related songs I’m sure you’d like to use in your videos!
Ahhh, man, your videos are just pure time travel magic!
This doesn't even seem like Oddware to me, it's just genuinely useful!
Just because it's oddware doesn't mean that it isn't useful. Just a bit odd.
I was unable to make mine work many years ago, but i will revisit it thanks to your video. You have given me new information about it. I am planing to build a XP retro Audio PC.
3:38 As someone who used to smoke and work/game back in the day, lighting your cigarette with a conveniently placed lighter that's right there in the case would have been such a killer thing to have. I'd almost have to say that's the drive bay freakshow that would have had the MOST real-world application purely by definition.
I certainly used mine! But I cleaned my PC regularly to avoid any grossness inside from smoke.
You just got even cooler seeing that you're a Faith No More fan
That would've been useful back in those days. A lot of cars back then were cassette only. but 150$ was quite a lot back then too
I'm not convinced. Why not just plug your walkman (or other tap deck) into your computer a record? Over $200 (with inflation) for this device seems nonsensical TBH
@@repatch43 Its the older version that appeals to me more, the idea that you could record your music from PC to tape deck that easily, mind you again its not hard to just run an aux to a recorder but maybe its more convient if you do it alot
You basically got a radio, the iso to your car pin adapter and some guy that installs it in your car for that
For probably less than half of that money back in the day you could just get a cheap boombox with a cassette deck and a line-in that was more versatile than this. But this is most certainly way more awesome with the 'digital controls'. I have 2 of these in fact (the old ones, with the record button) just for that reason! I knew about these back then, but it was too gimmicky to actually consider buying for the price.
@@repatch43 you could record on very few portable players.
Man the music in this episode is kinda great
Seeing WavePad brought back memories, that was my go-to for easy audio editing back in the day!
Still use it every day!
I enjoyed looking at this oddware with you. Thanks for taking us on the trip Clint!
I used to have a big cassette collection and I wanted one of these so badly when I was in high school.
LOL I went out to cash converters and bought a 3 head Yamaha tape deck (still have it) for like $20 and connected it to line in. I don't see why you'd need to spend 8x that to install a (likely) shitty head built into a small bay.
This is a gimmick, not a usable product.
@@the_kombinator I suppose most people who bought one of these did so for the convenience of being able to control all the processes directly from your computer, as apposed to having to manually do it...
@@Quickened1 Yes, and it was such a success that the company made only one product SMH. Also, you press one button (play) on the tape player and let Audacity record everything from the tape, then separate the tracks manually after the tape ends. This is exactly how I did it with Win 98. Paying $160 for the "convenience" of not having to physically press a button is simply retarded and a waste of money.
The device itself is an interesting topic to cover, but from a technical standpoint it is useless, there's no target market, and the quality of the thing seems low.
Had a friend with one of these. She used it for ripping old computer software on tape for modern emulators. Worked well.
It's bad that I kinda want a modern version of this. Pretty damn sweet.
same
Honestly you can accomplish the same thing still, just buy a cassette deck and an RCA to aux cable. Most PC cases don't even have space for drives now anyway
@@TheAbandonedAccount7 I know you can do this. It's easy to hookup a decent Walkman for a similar experience. But I like the idea of it being just there. Obviously my case and pretty much 90% of cases these days can't fit such things and they look ugly. Would've been neat to see a modernised version of it.
I have one and put it in my Windows XP gaming rig that I built to look like a LAN party PC from 2006. It's got all the obnoxious neon lights and the alien-like tower case and all the neon colored hardware and motherboards that flash strobe lights. Can play cassettes while smashing in Unreal Tournament or Quake. @@SmoothEmJay
Honestly this is the kind of stuff that I live for on this channel
This is a pretty cool gadget. Just wanted to mention that because it's controlled via RS-232, it should be easy to intercept the data and reverse-engineer the protocol, so you can replace their broken software. SysInternals have a free utility called PortMon that I've used to do just that kind of thing before. 🐱
Bro your video quality has improved like crazy since I was last on your channel! Always a pleasure coming back here and seeing how much you've grown. Stay awesome!
I appreciate that!
I probably would have had bought one of these for my pc back then had I known they existed. Still a good idea if you have an old tape collection that you want to upgrade to a more modern cd/digital format. Nice video.
As a youth, I wanted one of these so badly! I have no clue what I could use one for now, but I still want one. Thanks for the oddware Clint.
I need to see a car themed build with this and the thermaltake lighter cup holder combo
Just put it in the Hot Wheels PC
Hot Wheels PC.
back in the days i used to stuff all the gadgets i got into my pc. i also stumbled across this plusdeck, but here in europe they were absurd expensive! i think there was also a tape bay you could store data on! Like a backup tape, but with normal audiotapes.
Cool Edit was the true star of this video. 😍
I think Oddware is my favorite on this channel. I just love seeing all the goofy and/or innovative stuff that's fallen by the wayside over the years.
I really, really wish you one day stumble upon 3.5" CD-RW (yes, you read that right), 8 cm recorder I saw years ago in one of my clients' PCs. He said it came as a bundle (two products bought together, not in the same box) with his CD-RW based video camera, and used normal IDE interface, same as LS-120 internal drives did. I even had written down maker & model, but the scrap of paper is long gone.
18:46 That's a 4-track head, it's a neater way to do auto-reverse instead of having a rotating tape head. It does make it harder to do recording but since that isn't a feature here, it's the more reliable option.
Great point there.
This channel is like a time portal
Great Video Clint! Such a oddball piece of hardware for sure. If I had that back in the day, I would have used it on the computer I had then
I am so glad i managed to buy mine before you did a video on it, actually just looked at mind, it's the version with the record button.
Man, do I have the perfect pairing for this! I've been hanging onto an item for years since I've never seen another one. It's a PCI-card FM-Tuner for Windows 3.1 but it also works on 95, 98 and 2k. Yes, you too can now listen to the FM radio on your PC with this funky little gadget. I still have the card, and the 3.5" floppy with the program to run it.
My old tv tuner card had FM capabilities.
Lol 1:45 they used a 1999 Ford Cougar (which I have), and it came with a tape deck also! :D
Your oddware episodes have the neatest stuff! Now you just need to play some Bachman-Turner Overdrive in the BTO Plusdeck!
Glad to see Incesticide getting some love. Clint, you would probably love the "Grunge Lite" muzak album from 1993 if you haven't heard it before. It's grunge hits redone in a muzak/midi style. I have the whole album on my channel if you're interested.
Thats an intresting looking audio coverter! i never seen such thing!
i wonder if an 5.25'' PC record player also exist haha!
and do wanna note. you got an good music taste! epic to see that ELO secret messages & pink floyd momentary lapse of reason in the collecting!
Nice to see someone else interested in trains on a tech video! I like it when my other interests cross paths.
@@SebisRandomTech Intro retro tech - Music and even trains yep!
that tape collection you got there is pretty damn slick fella.
I need to take a second to say how awesome it is that you not only own Nevermind on cassette, but also Incesticide, Bleach, Remanufacture, and The Real thing as well. Good choices
years prior when cd roms were new and very expensive and napster was just getting popular, I hooked up a woodgrain cassette recorded from a component stereo to our family pc. I would make mixtapes from the mp3s I downloaded (on dial up). What a time.
I was doing both at the same time lol. Burned CDs with winmx and mixtapes using cassette + radio
Converting my cassettes to CD sounds like something I’d actually do.
Never saw such a thing before. You've got to love the beige box/iMac-influenced mashup front panel design.
It would be interesting to log the serial port communications, see what data and commands are being sent to/from the PlusDeck unit.
and then either
a) make custom software that actually works in modern windows
b) make custom modern hardware that works with original software
@@grimninja2004 Exactly!
I love this device I picked one up in 2012 pretty cheap it is great that I could play my tapes again and make a lot of my collecting into mp3's.
I used it with win 7 with no issues at all.
I'm starting to winder how many bays you'd need to put all those oddities you collect into the same case?
Just imagine the greatness 😅
Nothing goes wrong, I'm glad everything works fine for you on this video!!
At 3:30 nice... I still have Nevermind and Incesticide on cassette too! (Bleach, I could only get in CD back then here in Argentina, and had to as the only friend I had with a CD player to transfer it to a cassette for me 🙂)
that platinum silver with blue display.... that screams 2002-2003. Everything was silver with some form of blue display back then. So nice.
I've had my eye out for one of these for a long ass time! You just don't see them! Would be a lovely addition to the 98 rig so I can listen to my Prodigy tapes while playing Unreal. ❤
Holmey, just grab a Sony walkman. They're cheap enough
@@TheAbandonedAccount7 you are kinda missing the point.
I had this or a similar thing. had a tape deck in my car for a pretty simple reason: It was in the age of loud stereos and the subwoofers in the back of the car would make a cd player skip mercilessly when turned up, tapes however were fine. The headunit had a cd changer attached as well, but i had to burn them bass tests to tape.
For automating reading C64 tapes this would be ideal!
A simple python script to send serial commands and read audio from soundcard is all you'd need.
Someone may have already written something...
A buddy of mine had a marvelous Cd-Rom drive around 1998-2000. It was a 4 Cd's drive, you could put one in, press a button, the drive stashed it, and insert another Cd. You switched from one and other with a button, took about 30 seconds and voilá. Haven't seen one of those ever since.
That cassette mechanism looks very close to the one in my 2002 Toyota Solara. Yeah, don't try to take it apart. Very complicated and easy to break.
I'm sure that's where these things came from. "We got this giant crate of useless car parts, do something with it"
Those Nirvana Tapes got me drooling. Mad jealous.
Some of my favorite thrift finds
I can’t believe there was even a demand for something like this in 2006! Even I had moved on from cassettes by then with the advent of CDR drives and Limewire. I can’t believe something like this existed a year after I graduated 😂
there was a small convert-your-analog-stuff-to-digital fad in the mid 2000's. It appealed to those that weren't interested in piracy
I remember seeing stuff like this for VHS tapes in my late teens at like best buy. I guess the demand was for being able to archive your media like your home videotapes and recordings so they wouldn't be lost to time with the new century.
I still use cassettes occasionally lol like regularly
Lol I had the reflex to go empty my recycle bin when I saw Clint drag and drop that file into the bin.
Now that the new place is coming together! Every new LGR ep. Is a new revealing on how amazing Clint is making it! ❤
dude WHAT that's SO SICK
This might actually be really useful for archivists who are converting old media for the new age.
Actually not so much, seeing as it records through line in anyway, it would be better to get a higher quality tape deck and use it instead. This can't handle anything other than type 1 tapes, no DNR, and if you get one that played too fast you can't fix it.
Well if they're converting it to the new age, they might want to grab a PC that isn't 20 years old. Which means no drive bays. Which means, just get a deck + RCA to aux cord and use your PCs line in/audacity.
Thanks!
Say yes to cassette!!!!!
Love the things you come up with to review!
That looks like a pretty decent quality cassette mechanism, unlike what you'd find in present-day machines that all rely on the same cheap basic design full of plastic parts. I refer to Techmoan for the relevant videos of course :)
The same cheap Tanashin or cloned mechs.
too bad the software was so crappy
16:48 I was expecting... Ahhhhh that 2000s smell...(with a lot of reverb) Awesome device!
I would love to see a serial capture wedge between the PC serial port and the Plusdeck 2 to see what the serial commands are that are sent to it.
I could see some interesting python or other custom capture software written for it. :D
Even more so with the recording version. You could write some code to completely automate the recording precess (including efficient use of both tape sides, automatic and very precise equalisation (as the software could use test tones to calibrate to the cassette). Basically that would make the tape almost like an analog flash drive for music transfer.
3:31 Electric Light Orchestra. You have good taste. They were more of an 8-track band in their heyday.
I still love cassettes. I wish they’d make a full-fledged come back like records did. Be nice if we could get some high-quality blanks these days and some recorders and prerecorded tapes with Dolby.
Records never really went away enough to have a comeback. They’ve always been consistently popular with collectors and stereo nerds
The mechanism looked very similar to the mechanism that I have in a chrysler car radio. It even has identical ribbon cables.
When LGR uploads it's a good day. When LGR uploads an Oddware it's a great day.
Hi there! Please do send this to @Techmoan! I'm quite curious about the mechanism. Besides, he has the equipment to measure the deck's quality!
Clint that cdrom is extremely nostalgic to me. First computer of ours that my mom let me take apart had that same Toshiba drive. I believe it was 24x. Always makes me happy to see one!
Seeing you refer to your earlier graphic eq and cigarette lighter videos, I was wondering if it were possible to get a pc case that was all 5 1/4 bays at the front that could be used as a ‘sidecar’ that could be hooked up to your other PCs as some kind of ‘audio odd ware monster’ !?
This has to be one of the best 5.25 bay accessory so far .
I would have found this very useful, back in the day. I had loads of cassette tapes I could have digitised, if the idea had occurred to me at the time. Alas, it didn't, due in large to not knowing about it until now. Unfortunately, it's about 23 years too late to do anything about it! Although, that price tag would have put me off. Also, there's a far cheaper way I could have done the same thing, if I'd wanted to.
You can simply hook any tape deck up to the line in and digitize tapes. As a plus you can even record tapes if you want to make mixes, and you can select the proper noise reduction.
While this is very neat, it's sort of a gimmick simply because it's an extremely basic tape player.
@@volvo09 Thats what I'm doing right now, have about 20 old tapes my dad and his band recorded back in the day, using my old Technics dual deck player straight into the PC using Audacity. Its not a quick process, but better than waiting for the tapes to degrade
My brother would've found this useful back in the day. He does have hardware that is similar if not better than this, but the fact that this existed years ago is still amazing. In fact I think 3:21 is the model that he uses when editing old audio tape recordings and storing them in his PC.