Alesis TapeLink USB

Cassette tapes are the ugly, forgotten orphans of the digital-audio age. You probably have a trunk of tapes in a closet or attic somewhere, gathering dust and serving as a time capsule for music that makes you cringe. Some of us, though, still treasure the old mix tapes, bootlegs, and band demo tapes of our youth.

If you're itching to drag your old cassette tapes in to the digital age and load them onto your computer or MP3 player, the Alesis TapeLink USB ($299 list, $199 street) makes the transformation relatively painless. All you need is a computer and an afternoon to kill, and you can rip those old mix tapes onto your computer with a minimum of fuss.

Design
The Alesis TapeLink looks just like the cassette deck you probably owned in the '80s, except for the USB port hidden on the back. The TapeLink measures 16.5 inches wide by 8.5 inches deep by and 5.25 inches tall, and includes slots for two cassettes. Each cassette deck features buttons for play, pause, fast forward, rewind, and stop/eject, but the right-hand deck features a record button.

In the center of the TapeLink, sandwiched between the two cassette decks, is a playback-level meter, an analog counter, a switch to enable noise reduction, and a knob for adjusting the incoming recording level. Near the bottom, you'll also find buttons for controlling CrO2-type tape playback and recording, as well as internal dubbing (tape-to-tape), and high-speed dubbing.

The back of the unit isn't terribly exciting. Here you'll find RCA connections for stereo input and output, along with an attached power cable, USB output, and a small gain control knob for boosting the audio signal to your computer.

What's not included on the TapeLink, however, is any kind of autoreverse capability for playing both sides of a cassette in one pass. This seems like a huge misstep for a product meant to take the sting out of ripping cassettes to your computer. After all, if you're going to invest a few hundred dollars into a cassette deck, it should at least have all the same conveniences of your old, beat-up Walkman.

Software
Once you've gathered up all your old tapes and you have the TapeLink connected to your Mac or PC, it's time to start turning those tapes into digital files. To accomplish this, Alesis includes three pieces of software to help you capture, edit, and clean up your recordings.