A mate has given me a bundle of tapes and asked if I can copy them for them before they start to "go-off".

Now surely there must be a better way?

I was thinking of getting something like Tape2PC and converting them to MP3 before popping them on some CD's.

Anyone use anything suitable they can recommend?

Just in case it's of any interest :

http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=280934

For tapes of rare material, I just plug my Walkman into the line-in on the PC and rip them to decent bit-rate mp3s. It takes a while, but it's important if the material is worth saving.

For anything else, I throw them away and buy (or borrow) the CD. They're mastered from the original studio recordings and *should* be far superior to a stretched old K7.

Of course many CD re-releases suck in the quality department, but probably still better than you can do.

Thanks pcernie - that looks like what I need so have ordered one

The persons tapes are all of the "home made" variety from various brass band concerts they did with their band in years gone by so they won't be on CD's etc.

Nice one, seen it in their recent email

It was only a week or so ago I was reminiscing about the bits I used to have in my old hi-fi, one of which was an Aiwa AD-F800 tape deck, which I bought instead of a Nakamichi. This got me looking on Ebay at what these things are going for nowadays....this is what I really wanted the Nakamichi Dragon, but it was a bit too expensive at the time.

Tape device came today along with software to convert the music into MP3 and import into iTunes.

Plugged it in and got it going and so far no problems - converts music no problems.

Time to ditch those tapes for good

I've used my Technics tape deck connected to the phono ports on my X-Fi's breakout box to record some of the old tapes that I can't find on CD, used the mode switcher for the X-Fi (Audio Creation) to record as WAV's and Audacity to convert to MP3. It's a bit of a long winded way of doing it but the sound quality isn't too bad.