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BTO's Plusdeck2 ($150 street) is an innovative computer-controlled audiocassette recorder that lets you convert tapes into MP3 files and copy digital music to cassette. It lacks some of the bells and whistles we take for granted in late-model cassette recorders, but is still the easiest way we know to copy tapes to your PC or to record your digital music collection to cassette for playback on an old boom box or automobile tape deck.

Installing the Plusdeck2 can be cumbersome, a situation that isn't helped by the device's often-incoherent documentation. Setup involves screwing the deck into an external drive bay and cabling it to a slotless back-panel interface card that must then be patched to a serial port and to your sound board's 1/8-inch line-in/line-out jacks. If your system lacks a serial interface, you're out of luck, and if your sound board, like our Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro, has the wrong type of jacks, you'll have to purchase adapters.

Our evaluation unit lacked luxuries like Dolby noise reduction and bias settings for Type II chrome and Type IV metal tapes, but it lived up to our expectations in most other ways. Its bundled software made it simple to copy a tape to our hard drive in MP3 format, or to record a cassette from WAV files, MP3 files, a CD, the deck's built-in stereo mic, or any other audio source routed through our sound board. Our biggest beef was with the Plusdeck2's Auto-Split feature, which tries to save each tape track as a separate MP3 file, but doesn't work reliably with source material that has a wide dynamic range.

Despite its rough edges, our early-production test unit provided solid, crash-free performance and delivered better sound than we would have expected from a mid-priced consumer tape deck. If your computer has a spare serial port and if you can live with relatively noisy normal-bias tapes, the Plusdeck2 could be the missing link in your evolutionary journey to an all-digital music system.

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Copyright ?? 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in PC Magazine.