I'm shocked the record industry survived this technological marvel.

I was the engineer who repaired this product. It's a new feeling to see it after so much time has passed.

Man, Anders Enger Jenson sure knows how to play the game. He gets so much free publicity from pretty much every retro/tech KZfaqr around.

Man, a cup holder AND a tape deck? This thing has all the features!

I half expected Techmoan to pop out of the woodgrain at some point. Always love an oddware episode!

I'd love to see a beige large server tower filled with all these oddware 5 1/4" drive bays.. speaker... crt...cig lighter..vu meter ... would be great!

Also odd that it appearantly records in 44.1KHz 8 bit stereo. Did a quick calculation because when you played that clicky WAV recording in Winamp, it showed 705kbps where it should have been 1411.

Bro, you're probably never reading this but today I need to share something with you... For the past 2 years I've been struggling with depression, i work too many hours and I spend my weekends usually alone, however every Friday I like to cook something good, relax and have dinner watching your videos and content... I'm not even American but I wish someday I could thank you in person for helping me survive week after week, recently things have been going better for me and that's why I wanted to share. Thank you so much LGR

As much as an audiophile my pop was, he still had his old Sony dual tape deck wired into his computer with some proprietary software he had for his cassettes, but had an ION record player that was also wired in, and this.... This would have been a godsend to him... RIP pop, hope I'll get your reel to reel working someday soon and can play your reels soon

I actually have a 2c and the software works perfectly on Windows 11 with a good ol’ USB to serial converter and a usb sound card. I actually quite like it. It’s cool listening to all my dads old classic rock tapes through my pc while I work.

I'd like to see someone build a 2000-2005ish tower, big as it can be, with maxed out 5.25 slots of all the silly items, all functional. That would be impressive.

I think the recording version would have been AWESOME in the early 2000s. In 2000, almost all cars still had tape players. Recording them was a kind of lengthy process (setting up the deck, adjusting the level, preparing a playlist, monitoring it). With this you should have been able ( not sure how they implemented the S/W) to just drag a few files on the App, it should be possible to automatically arrange them for best use of both sides (in theory it should even be able to apply EQ by recording test tones to the tape, rewinding, and then auto adjust the sound output EQ), click go and just walk away / do something else on the PC. Would be super convenient for quick tape recordings to be later used in a car. Almost like an analog flash drive.

Ahh...digital and analog going hand in hand in harmony. What a beautiful sound to behold.

I had this and it was AMAZING. Being able to convert my jam tapes to MP3 was a game changer back in the day!

I just finished tearing down a VW Gamma Stereo from the late 90s/Early 2000s for a full refurb. That mechanism looks near 1:1 with the one from the VW (which I believe was based on a Sony Design) even down to the belt layout, and the ribbon cable usage and placement. Kinda wanna find one of these for my Win 2000 system now. Really enjoyed finding out this was even a thing.

It never crossed my mind that something like this would exist. My car still has a cassette player, I bought my favourite modern album (Dave - were all alone in this together) and it came on cassette, record and CD

I need to see a car themed build with this and the thermaltake lighter cup holder combo

I'm probably not the first to think this, but I bet this thing could be pretty handy for use in archiving old computer tapes. Since it's serial, the protocol should be fairly simple to reverse engineer, so one could ditch the Plusdeck native software (probably a good thing, as it appears that the software is causing glitches in the recording) and write an open source app to control the deck and manage the recording (setting the sound card to highest quality of course.) Might even be possible to programatically monitor the audio stream as it's being recorded so as to detect blank/silent spots (so that tapes with multiple programs on them can be automagically split into separate files) and maybe even somehow decode the audio stream in order to automagically detect the filenames. (this latter would be tricky but doable I think.) Might have to pick up one of these at some point. Of course, if they are being used for retro archiving, the prices of these things have probably gone through the roof by now. :-P

You brought me way back when I saw the icons on your desktop! I played tons of NFS2, Duke Nukem and Carmageddon.

Pretty cool. There are still modern day solutions for this but the retro factor is great. Love those old Roland speakers. I always wanted a pair of those back in the day.

I really, really wish you one day stumble upon 3.5" CD-RW (yes, you read that right), 8 cm recorder I saw years ago in one of my clients' PCs. He said it came as a bundle (two products bought together, not in the same box) with his CD-RW based video camera, and used normal IDE interface, same as LS-120 internal drives did. I even had written down maker & model, but the scrap of paper is long gone.

Jesus, the 21" CRT in the background. I knew it was big in the video he posted about it, but now that it's in a proper scale with other computers and stuff on the tables....holy dang.

I remember back in the day in my childhood when microcenter used to have an aisle of all the strange crap you review on oddware. Late 90s and early 2000s were a beautiful time for computers

I desperately wanted one of these back in the day, they were definitely expensive by kid standards

Man I'm still fascinated by this older tech but I come here because we're similar in age but Clint has a lot more patience than I do these days for things to work only after a lot of troubleshooting. My first hand-me-down windows pc was a DX-33 which my brother insisted I assemble myself. Was glad he did because it inspired me to develop a competency with computers that I still enjoy today, however today I don't have alot of free time to tinker & overcome challenges. Goddamn work life.

as someone who tries to get and keep original head units in vintage cars, I'd love to had a tape drive capable of recording tapes in my PC. Sure, there are cassette-shaped devices that allows to plug a modern MP3 player or phone using a jack or bluetooth in a deck, but having a collection of real home-recorded mix tapes (that magically convert into Best Of Queen) is the real vintage experience.

I've got one these in my Gateway Destination, it made a lot of sense to put it in a PC like that. Though, I only use the playback function and haven't tried recording to mp3, so seeing you use that function was interesting and informative!

As a cassette collector I was always curious about these!

That would've been useful back in those days. A lot of cars back then were cassette only. but 150$ was quite a lot back then too

Glad you said what BTO stood for. Almost thought Bachman Turner Overdrive got into the PC peripheral business for a second.

Neat! 😅 Man, I gotta finish this new album I have in mind… lots of useful computer related songs I’m sure you’d like to use in your videos!

It's bad that I kinda want a modern version of this. Pretty damn sweet.

I used to have a big cassette collection and I wanted one of these so badly when I was in high school.

back in the days i used to stuff all the gadgets i got into my pc. i also stumbled across this plusdeck, but here in europe they were absurd expensive! i think there was also a tape bay you could store data on! Like a backup tape, but with normal audiotapes.

I enjoyed looking at this oddware with you. Thanks for taking us on the trip Clint!

Ahhh, man, your videos are just pure time travel magic!

You always find the best oddware

This doesn't even seem like Oddware to me, it's just genuinely useful!

I'm excited to see you get your hands on one of these. A few years ago I rebuilt a PC for a friend and he wanted to recycle this part. Recently I was doing an upgrade and he decided to give this to me!

I was unable to make mine work many years ago, but i will revisit it thanks to your video. You have given me new information about it. I am planing to build a XP retro Audio PC.

Great Video Clint! Such a oddball piece of hardware for sure. If I had that back in the day, I would have used it on the computer I had then

This is a pretty cool gadget. Just wanted to mention that because it's controlled via RS-232, it should be easy to intercept the data and reverse-engineer the protocol, so you can replace their broken software. SysInternals have a free utility called PortMon that I've used to do just that kind of thing before. 🐱

Love the things you come up with to review!

3:38 As someone who used to smoke and work/game back in the day, lighting your cigarette with a conveniently placed lighter that's right there in the case would have been such a killer thing to have. I'd almost have to say that's the drive bay freakshow that would have had the MOST real-world application purely by definition.

I probably would have had bought one of these for my pc back then had I known they existed. Still a good idea if you have an old tape collection that you want to upgrade to a more modern cd/digital format. Nice video.

Man, do I have the perfect pairing for this! I've been hanging onto an item for years since I've never seen another one. It's a PCI-card FM-Tuner for Windows 3.1 but it also works on 95, 98 and 2k. Yes, you too can now listen to the FM radio on your PC with this funky little gadget. I still have the card, and the 3.5" floppy with the program to run it.

Bro your video quality has improved like crazy since I was last on your channel! Always a pleasure coming back here and seeing how much you've grown. Stay awesome!

Had a friend with one of these. She used it for ripping old computer software on tape for modern emulators. Worked well.

Clint's tape collection, though... Respect!

I've had my eye out for one of these for a long ass time! You just don't see them! Would be a lovely addition to the 98 rig so I can listen to my Prodigy tapes while playing Unreal. ❤

Your oddware episodes have the neatest stuff! Now you just need to play some Bachman-Turner Overdrive in the BTO Plusdeck!

I did use a cassette deck and a computer, through a home made a adapter, to digitize my cassettes. I never knew such a thing as this existed. That is actually true of many of the things you show us. If someone were to try to build something like that today, they would have a problem getting quality cassette mechanisms. As far as I know, there is only one company making cassette mechanisms now and they are poor quality. Anyway, it is a neat device.

Converting my cassettes to CD sounds like something I’d actually do.

It would be interesting to log the serial port communications, see what data and commands are being sent to/from the PlusDeck unit.

I do not remember seeing these around... wild. Great video as usual!

Honestly this is the kind of stuff that I live for on this channel

That cassette mechanism looks very close to the one in my 2002 Toyota Solara. Yeah, don't try to take it apart. Very complicated and easy to break.

Thats an intresting looking audio coverter! i never seen such thing! i wonder if an 5.25'' PC record player also exist haha! and do wanna note. you got an good music taste! epic to see that ELO secret messages & pink floyd momentary lapse of reason in the collecting!

I had this or a similar thing. had a tape deck in my car for a pretty simple reason: It was in the age of loud stereos and the subwoofers in the back of the car would make a cd player skip mercilessly when turned up, tapes however were fine. The headunit had a cd changer attached as well, but i had to burn them bass tests to tape.

Nothing goes wrong, I'm glad everything works fine for you on this video!!

18:46 That's a 4-track head, it's a neater way to do auto-reverse instead of having a rotating tape head. It does make it harder to do recording but since that isn't a feature here, it's the more reliable option.

I need to take a second to say how awesome it is that you not only own Nevermind on cassette, but also Incesticide, Bleach, Remanufacture, and The Real thing as well. Good choices

I've had one of these for yeas now, and its true, under windows 98, it doesn't seem to work as well. I bought mine about 12 years ago, and have had it installed in several vintage boxes, but about three years ago I put it in an old Dell Dimension desktop, with windows XP. Somewhere along the line I found some updated drivers for it, not even sure I still have them! Upon installing them, I found it works perfectly! I've had a continuing project, off and on now for several years converting some 500 cassettes from my late Father, and it has just kept doing what I needed for it to do! Nice to see that you found this, and did a great review!

That thing would be really useful for archiving and replicating old 1980's Home Computer games. Wow!!

I'm starting to winder how many bays you'd need to put all those oddities you collect into the same case? Just imagine the greatness 😅

At 3:30 nice... I still have Nevermind and Incesticide on cassette too! (Bleach, I could only get in CD back then here in Argentina, and had to as the only friend I had with a CD player to transfer it to a cassette for me 🙂)

Jesse you Rock! This Simply Beautiful hardware!

Never saw such a thing before. You've got to love the beige box/iMac-influenced mashup front panel design.

I mean- one cool thing you could hypothetically do with this is playback or record your real retail Commodore 64 or other 8-bit microcomputer games on tape format and play them on an emulator with your modern (at-least "modern" by the standards of when they produced this product) PC.

Now that the new place is coming together! Every new LGR ep. Is a new revealing on how amazing Clint is making it! ❤

Seeing WavePad brought back memories, that was my go-to for easy audio editing back in the day!

I remember wanting one of those back in the day. Thanks for the memories :)

I would love to see a serial capture wedge between the PC serial port and the Plusdeck 2 to see what the serial commands are that are sent to it. I could see some interesting python or other custom capture software written for it. :D

Say yes to cassette!!!!!

My elderly dad liked listening to his music and recording it off radio so I bought a cassette recorder boombox with aux input and used that for the PC speakers and dad would record stuff off the PC radio stream via the boombox.

Stuff like this is so cool!! Thanks LGR

I can’t believe there was even a demand for something like this in 2006! Even I had moved on from cassettes by then with the advent of CDR drives and Limewire. I can’t believe something like this existed a year after I graduated 😂

The mechanism looked very similar to the mechanism that I have in a chrysler car radio. It even has identical ribbon cables.

that tape collection you got there is pretty damn slick fella.

Awesome 👍 thx for sharing! I remember these.

I think Oddware is my favorite on this channel. I just love seeing all the goofy and/or innovative stuff that's fallen by the wayside over the years.

Wow, I always thought audio cassette tapes could never be inserted in desktop computers in the old days. This cassette deck accessory looks impressive.

Clint that cdrom is extremely nostalgic to me. First computer of ours that my mom let me take apart had that same Toshiba drive. I believe it was 24x. Always makes me happy to see one!

Lol I had the reflex to go empty my recycle bin when I saw Clint drag and drop that file into the bin.

For automating reading C64 tapes this would be ideal! A simple python script to send serial commands and read audio from soundcard is all you'd need. Someone may have already written something...

I'd quite like to add a record deck to my desktop PC, now.

Glad to see Incesticide getting some love. Clint, you would probably love the "Grunge Lite" muzak album from 1993 if you haven't heard it before. It's grunge hits redone in a muzak/midi style. I have the whole album on my channel if you're interested.

Man the music in this episode is kinda great

That looks like a pretty decent quality cassette mechanism, unlike what you'd find in present-day machines that all rely on the same cheap basic design full of plastic parts. I refer to Techmoan for the relevant videos of course :)

I wonder if there's any monster sized case tall enough to hold every singe drive option Clint has obtained? 🤔😛

years prior when cd roms were new and very expensive and napster was just getting popular, I hooked up a woodgrain cassette recorded from a component stereo to our family pc. I would make mixtapes from the mp3s I downloaded (on dial up). What a time.

LGR Oddware is my top 3 series in KZfaq

This might actually be really useful for archivists who are converting old media for the new age.

Hi there! Please do send this to @Techmoan! I'm quite curious about the mechanism. Besides, he has the equipment to measure the deck's quality!

As a youth, I wanted one of these so badly! I have no clue what I could use one for now, but I still want one. Thanks for the oddware Clint.

Watching your videos makes me want to build a retro PC.

I would have found this very useful, back in the day. I had loads of cassette tapes I could have digitised, if the idea had occurred to me at the time. Alas, it didn't, due in large to not knowing about it until now. Unfortunately, it's about 23 years too late to do anything about it! Although, that price tag would have put me off. Also, there's a far cheaper way I could have done the same thing, if I'd wanted to.

Silly? Something that is usefull ain't silly! Seriously, had I known that this existed back then, I'd have gotten one! Hell, I was playing around with hooking up a TV and VCR to a PC! ps: But I am a grandpa anyway when it comes to computers, because to me a computer is defective if it has no optical drives (many people think they are obsolete, but frankly I am not a streaming kind of guy, so I own some of my favourite shows on DVD or Blue-Ray, so I need a drive - as I don't have a large TV, blue-ray-player and sound-system! Do I want that? sure, but frankly it's expensive...as is my gaming PC, so why not use that while I save up? ;)

I never heard about this old technology but I like it ! Thanks LGR :)

the perfect device to put in your PC back then to back up or convert cassette tapes to digital and store them on the computer. Perfect for someone who has a computer and a tape collection they want to preserve.