Most of the products we reviewed come in the form of a small handheld cassette player with a USB port that connects to your computer. These devices are usually coupled with a software component that you need to install on your system.
Once you have the cassette you want to convert in the deck and connect to your computer, all you need to do is press Play on your deck and Record in the software, and it will capture the audio as it plays back. After the converter software has captured the audio, you can export it as an MP3. Then, you can do pretty much anything with it. You can burn it to a CD, sync it to any of the best smartphones, upload it to the internet, or import it into an audio editing application for further work.
Converting the audio found on cassette tapes can be a time-consuming process. That’s because it’s not a simple file transfer that only takes a few seconds. Cassette to MP3 converters must record the audio in real-time as it plays in the deck. If you’re converting a whole cassette, this can take up to an hour. Then, you have to go into the application to listen to the captured content, edit the audio, separate the tracks, and a few other things. These are all pretty simple things to master, but they can be quite involved as well. Just know that if you’re converting a lot of tapes, you’re probably looking at a long-term project.