LGR Oddware: The 5.25" PC Cassette Tape Deck! Plusdeck 2c 

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

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

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

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.

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.

As a cassette collector I was always curious about these!

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!

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

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.

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!

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

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

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

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.

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

You always find the best oddware

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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.

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

thats the coolest thing ive ever seen. software controlled cassette! WTF? I want one!

Love the things you come up with to review!

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 😂

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

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

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.

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. 🐱

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

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!

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.

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'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. ❤

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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!

Awesome 👍 thx for sharing! I remember these.

Say yes to cassette!!!!!

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!

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

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

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 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.

I love all these weird peripherals and expansion devices that get featured in Oddware. It never ocurred to me that there might be a casette tape drive made for PCs but I guess it makes sense from a certain point of view; there were cd and minidisk drives, so why not a tape drive. Early PC CD drives had a dedicated sound output you'd hook up to the sound card; and the VERY early home computers even used casettes as cheap data storage to start with. Still a pretty silly option in the windows 95/98 era, but I love that it existed.

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

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 😅

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

This has to be one of the best 5.25 bay accessory so far .

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

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

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...

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!

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.

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 🙂)

I still love cassettes. I wish they’d make a full-fledged come back like records did. Be nice if we could get some high-quality blanks these days and some recorders and prerecorded tapes with Dolby.

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.

Man the music in this episode is kinda great

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

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

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

Another brilliant video!

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

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

Jesse you Rock! This Simply Beautiful hardware!

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.

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 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.

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

Stuff like this is so cool!! Thanks LGR

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

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!

I am so glad i managed to buy mine before you did a video on it, actually just looked at mind, it's the version with the record button.

As always, good video!