QFX RETRO-39 Portable Shoebox Cassette Tape Recorder – USB to Cassette Recording, Built-in Microphone, 3.5" Bluetooth Speaker, FM Radio, MP3 Playback, Line-in/Out, AC/Battery Powered

I bought this to make my sister's mix tapes for X-Mas. There is something about mix tapes that are unique and cassette tapes is the only medium that it really works on. Mix CDs, close, but not the same. The songs need to be listened in order.First remember - this is a tape player, so the sound is not as good as other mediums. cassettes are the worst sound quality. This is not the tape players fault. Hence me grading it an 8. It works as well as expected and for 30 bucks I cannot imagine something sounding better.The built in microphone does not work well. if you are buying this to record your voice memos, you shouldn't. I am not going to ding my score based on this.The line in - This works well. The quality was decent when recording from my phone. There are a lot of variables in play here. The best thing to do is max your volume when imputing. Remember, your cable has a lot to do with it also moving around ect.Why I gave it 5 stars. The USB jack. Despite there being absolutely no documentation on it, once I figured out how to get this to work perfect and I decided not to give it a 1 star and return it.The way the USB works is. Put your songs or what you want to on the USB drive. plug it in. Put into USB mode. It will play the audio files on your USB. Sadly, it doesn't transfer the meta data, but remember, it is an analog cassette tape.temper your expectations to that and the product will suit your needs, especially if you are making mix tapes.finally, my wife's old mix tapes play wonderfully on the device. Line out works great if you want to transfer them that way, however I think there are better methods to export mixtapes.

I'm old and I got a desire to play a cassette tape that I had, and after looking around I settled on this. I really like it. I like the ka-chunk buttons, the styling, and I really like the heft of it when it's full of C batteries. The speaker is small but I like it too. It's nostalgia overload for folks of a certain age.One thing to be warned about, it's not designed for recording mix tapes and things from the external line in. The record function only works through the integrated microphone, so the record function is really for recording dictation and the like, as the old versions were. You will need to acquire a tape deck that can record from a line in in order to make your own mix tapes. But as a player with line out, bluetooth, and USB support, it's a surprising amount of modern stuff built into an adorable package. If QFX made a modern retro tape deck that could record from an external source, I'd have bought that too!

The media could not be loaded. Disappointing is the only word that fits. The tape unit has everything a user might want: USB, Bluetooth, internal mic, even a decent sounding FM radio receiver. The only thing missing is the ability to record tapes that are useable.With Bluetooth connected and active but idle so far as sending data, there is not a sound coming from the built in speaker. And given that USB is digital, there should be none. But, set the unit to record that “silence” and then play it back, and you get far too much white noise. Record music and the level of background noise is high enough to make the tape unusable.Complicating it further, though the computer’s sound volume is set to 75% of maximum, the volume of what’s recorded, when played in my car’s system is significantly quieter than it is when switched to the radio, or disk player (a JBL speaker system in an older Toyota Avalon). That is not true when playing a tape created on some other system.In fact, with some of the tapes I recorded you can hear speech in the background that obviously is bleed-over from the unit’s FM system, which was been switched off when the recording was made. And, in the background of a tape that recorded only silence is a rhythmic thud.And if that weren’t enough, the unit ate two of my tapes, which were pulled behind the transport drive and crumpled.It’s a nice unit, and I want to like it. But somewhere in the chain, someone screwed up.

I’m very pleased with this product overall, I bought it to record music on blank cassette tapes. I know that there is a lot of mix reviews on this product about the tape recording settings, and I figured out what’s the problem. The music has to be at a high volume level which people have trouble with and so did I. I was about to return it but I still wanted to figure out what was wrong with it and only when I turned the volume up at an extreme level on garage band with duplicating the audio and increasing the volume I got it to fully adjust to be able to hear the music without any static in the background. So it works but you gotta do all that stuff to make it able to be listen to. Everything else about it works nice too Bluetooth and input and output settings. And these kinds of tape recorders were originally only made for recording voice memos or voice calls, so not really the best at recording music but for me personally it got the job done and I’m glad of the outcome.