The New York Times has an article about the Alesis TapeLink, which is a tape deck you can attach to your computer via USB, and use to convert analog cassette tapes to a digital format you can use with iTunes, or any other media player.
I haven’t tried it, and at $299 list price, I’m not likely to, but if you have a large investment in audiobooks on cassette tapes, it might be a worthwhile investment for getting those books into a format that will last beyond the lifetime of the cassette medium.
I bought an “ION USB TAPE2PC cassette converter archiver MP£/PC/CD” on e-bay , as a faulty customer return item , testing with “a sound card – err 07 on the LCD screen and has no output to the monitor ( image or sound )” with all leads Cd etc etc. for about £25.00 ( I’m in the UK so don’t know the exact exchange rate ) to convert my large collection of cassette audio books .
Being computor illiterate I plugged it all together and no one was more surprised than myself when it worked!!!
My son tells me that as a stand alone player , the speakers don’t work , but through the computor it does. ?
The process is a bit long and tedious and most titles end up being side one or two and so on. BUT it works for me , and am now listening to ooooooooold audiobooks from my tape collection!
Many thanks for assistance and encouragement………….
Regards Bob A
I bought a used Nakamichi tape deck on eBay for about $30. Combined it with a $5 standard RCA to 3.5 mm jack cable that goes into the audio input port on the computer. Software is the free, open-source Audacity. I use these to generate AIFF files, which are converted to AAC in iTunes.
OK well this does look interesting, but, $299.00! What’s this thing going to do that my old cassette deck plugged into my sound card + a copy of SoundSoap (streets for $80-$90) going to do? For that price I hope it has a REALLY good DAC