

Contacting tech support for help was a frustrating experience.
#Ion tape2pc download software
When you finish recording, the application presents you with a tagging screen where you type in the artist, album title, and song title for each track.Īs with Ion’s LP 2 CD ( ), the software CD that shipped with the Tape 2 PC came with an outdated version of EZ Audio Creator, and the company’s site made it difficult to download an updated Mac version. There also doesn’t appear to be any way to change the file type or quality that EZ Audio Converter uses from its default 160-kbps, 44.1kHz MP3 files. Unfortunately, the software offers no automatic track splitting, requiring you to push the large New Track button between each song while recording. The built-in noise reduction plug-in, however, did a decent job of removing hiss from a tape I imported using the Tape 2 PC.ĮZ Audio Converter provides a much more attractive interface and is simple to use. This process isn’t obvious, however, and it took visiting the Audacity Wiki to find the instructions. Audacity can also analyze your imported audio and take a stab at splitting your one large file into separate tracks based on silences between songs. It offers multiple format and quality settings, as well as noise reduction tools. Audacity is full-featured, but its user interface could intimidate many technophobes. Ion provides two Mac recording applications, the open-source Audacity and EZ Audio Converter.

At the same time, it did a pretty good job importing tapes-audio I captured with it sounded the same on my Mac as it did played directly through a tape deck.īut although the hardware setup couldn’t be easier, the software for capturing, editing, and saving your audio files could still use some work.

(You can connect the Tape 2 PC to your home stereo receiver via the RCA line-out ports and use it as a standard dubbing cassette deck.) The Tape 2 PC is lightweight, but in a way that makes it feel cheaply made. OS X recognizes the device automatically and lets you capture audio directly from the deck using the supplied software or other audio editing programs. You connect the Tape 2 PC to your Mac via the USB port on the Tape 2 PC’s back and included cable. With it’s Tape 2 PC, Ion Audio is betting that my situation is not unique. I’d love to have easy access to the contents of these cassettes, but the cassettes themselves I’d prefer to live without. I have two large boxes of cassettes-demo tapes of friends bands, mix tapes, guitar lessons, and more-that I’ve lugged around with me every time I’ve moved over the last couple of decades. And while the audio fidelity of cassette tapes was never that great, the compact size and ease of recording audio to tape made the format very popular.

That says something about the popularity of cassettes. At last count, the Facebook page “When I was younger I would record my favorite songs off the radio onto tape” had more than 875,000 fans.
