Alesis TapeLink USB

Jan Hughes — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 06:03:00 -0500

Now you can add your favorite mixtapes and your old demos to iTunes.

Remember those late-night jam sessions... a few guitars, a bass, a couple of singers, and some mics and a mixer hooked up to a 4-track in your friend’s living room? Remember how good you thought you sounded? However aggrandized your memories of those distant sessions, you can digitize your aging cassettes for posterity. Alesis’s TapeLink USB digital-archiving dual-cassette tape deck enables you to store your irreplaceable home recordings--or your entire oeuvre of mixtapes from the ’80s--on hard disk, burn them to CD, or add them to iTunes.

While anyone can convert cassette tapes to digital files if they have a tape deck and the right cable, the TapeLink is banking on this unit being your one-stop shop. The deck sports LED level-meters, noise-reduction circuitry, and 16-bit, 44.1kHz CD-quality audio output, and comes with three apps to assist with conversion, clean-up, and editing: EZ Tape Converter transfers files effortlessly, Audacity provides audio-editing tools, and BIAS SoundSoap can help clean up noise problems associated with old tapes. And while all of these apps are available individually (Audacity is open source), Alesis bundles them together for your convenience.

Setting up the TapeLink was beyond easy; we plugged in the USB cable into our laptop and loaded the apps that come with the deck and we were off. After launching the EZ Tape Converter, which was thankfully easy to figure out, considering the instructions that come with the unit are practically useless, we readied our first tape and set aside a few hours to digitize and reminisce. The deck supports both standard and metal tapes and the accompanying software converts analog tape into digital files for use with your computer. Conversion happens in real time, so you have to babysit the process and stop manually after each track--or digitize a whole side and break up the individual tracks with Audacity or another editor. Once converted, you add album and track titles, and EZ Tape Converter saves them in iTunes, a handy feature. We adjusted the gain levels as we went along to minimize distortion and turn up quiet recordings. And we had to redo the first few tapes because when we played them back, we realized we had also recorded room noises, so be sure to turn off your Mac’s mic in System Preferences before you begin.

The TapeLink has dual decks for normal and high-speed dubbing, which seems like an odd feature--presumably, as you are making digital renditions of your tunes, you wouldn’t really want duplicate tapes. And in the event that you want to play your tapes through your home stereo system, the TapeLink also features RCA outputs.

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Alesis TapeLink USB