TapeDeck - a Fun, Inexpensive Audio Recorder for Mac OSX

A while ago, my mom came to me with a problem. Her father, during the 1950s, had been a reel-to-reel enthusiast, and she had inherited his reel-to-reel machine and reels of audio that he had recorded. Over the years, something had happened to the machine, but there was access to a new one. The problem was that the reels of audio were getting old. They had been stored, at various times, in dark, moldy, flooded basements, so who knew what kind of shape they were in?

The goal was to turn the reel-to-reel audio into digital audio. Not a big deal. We could just take them to a recording studio, and have them professionally transfered. But that would have cost a good deal of money, and besides, no one was really sure if everything on the reels was really something that would be of interest to anyone.

I had previously transfered a few cassette tapes onto my computer, by running a USB cable (patched through a Belkin USB to RCA audio converter) from my computer to the tape deck. The audio went out the RCA jacks, into the converter and then into my computer, after being converted to digital signals. This went directly into a sound recorder I'd purchased even longer ago (called SoundStudio, still available for around 50-60 dollars).

I was looking at that converted audio recently, and somehow that got me thinking about recording again. It was then that I realized my old copy of SoundStudio was no longer any good with the newer versions of Mac OSX. It still worked, sort of, but the audio was kind of choppy and fuzzy, and the interface was slow. Sure, I could have purchased an upgrade license, but that got me to looking at what other applications were out there to serve the same purpose. One that I found, called TapeDeck, really impressed me.

First, let me make clear that TapeDeck and SoundStudio aren't really products I'd be comfortable placing in the same category. SoundStudio does more than just record audio. It does that, sure, but also acts as an audio mixer and editor. TapeDeck, on the other hand, is just that - a digital tape deck. And what does a tape deck do? It records and plays sound. And that's what TapeDeck does as well.