I’ve been putting the SEMIER SM-I36 through its paces, and honestly, it’s a beast for what it is. If you’ve got a backlog of old cassettes that need saving, this is the tool for the job. Direct-to-PC Recording is Flawless Most of these "converters" are total junk—flimsy plastic that feels like it’ll eat your tapes. This one is different. The PC recording works flawlessly. I plugged it in, and the OS picked it up immediately—no fighting with drivers or weird workarounds. The audio signal is clean, too. You get that solid analog warmth without the digital hum or motor flutter that usually plagues the cheap stuff. The Breakdown Solid Build: It’s "small" but doesn't feel like a toy. The buttons have a real tactile click. Rock-Solid Playback: The motor speed is actually consistent. No dragging or "underwater" sounding audio here. Zero Friction: It’s basically plug-and-play. If you’re trying to digitize a whole library, this is easily the path of least resistance. Bottom Line It’s rare to find a modern tape player that actually delivers. Whether you’re hit with a wave of nostalgia or just mid-project trying to archive years of audio, the SM-I36 is a sleeper hit. It’s compact, reliable, and just gets the work done. Read more
Stop it! am a 61 year old audiophile and this item compares to any old school toy from 1979. as i write this note audio for size is 10+. a solid unit , feels like im holding SHARP GF9191,or my JVC RCM70 boombox solid! I will buy this unit for my 3 year old grandchild as a StarterKit for ananlog old farts such as I. HIGHLY RECOMMENED, Read more
The SM-163 Cassette Player MP3 Converter is a very convenient, no hassle way to digitize your old cassette tapes. My venerable Sony cassette deck's rubber drive belts have turned to glue and about 100 cassettes from the 1970s and 1980s are inaccessible. This is a simple way to put those tapes into an accessible modern format. Given the price, one shouldn't expect the highest quality and precision, and indeed one has to fiddle with the tape a little to load it sometimes, but this is minor. Overall I was pleased with the operation. One just has to load the cassette, load a MicroSD card (included), press a couple of buttons and wait. The device shuts off automatically at the end. Turn the tape around, press a couple of buttons, and it records the other side. I converted cassettes to digital both with the MicroSD card internally, and with the USB cable connected to my computer recording with the included Audacity software (I suggest downloading the latest version rather than using what's on the CD). The reason I downrated this is an unmet expectation based on the Amazon product description that says: "Preserve your cherished music collection in a modern digital format." If a user cherishes their music collection — especially stereo recordings — they'll reasonably expect a converter to preserve stereo fidelity. The SM-163 does not. It mixes the left and right channels into one single monaural output that is then sent to both the left and right channels of the output MP3 file or the headphone jack. The headphone jack wiring is nonstandard — it connects only two of the three terminals, and neither is ground. This works for headphones but may cause issues when connecting to audio systems without a custom cable.. I spent the better part of an afternoon trying to figure out what was wrong before coming to the realization that this was not a stereo device. That fact was confirmed by a prompt response from the seller: "This is not a stereo cassette player." Let me be clear: there is nothing in the product description, nor in the Instruction Manual with the word "stereo." I asked Rufus, and it said it didn't know. I just jumped to a wrong conclusion. In reality, most of my old cassette tapes are not stereo. Some are "stereo compatible," which just means they are monaural but work on a stereo cassette deck. I have decided to keep the SM-163 because it's convenient and my cassettes are mostly old memories rather than serious music to listen to. Plus a full conversion would require manually breaking up cassette sides into individual tracks and labeling them. The converted cassettes sound good, and studio monitor headphones plugged into the SM-163 deliver clean playback — even if it’s mono. Read more
I bought this so I could go retro and listen to music on cassette tapes again. I bought this a pack Maxell 60 minute blank cassettes for the endeavor. I loaded mp3 songs on the SD card and loaded the blank cassette and hit record. The earlier tests produced a recording with inconsistent speed, with the audio speeding up then slowing down. I had to clean the play/record head. It was very dirty. I tried again. The transfer was successful but there was a constant hissing in the background. So if you're transferring music from sd card to cassette, look for something else Read more
well, SO FAR (day 1) it's doing what i need it to do. I have some old cassettes from when i was younger and it's playing them and recoding them directly into the included MicroSD card.👌🏻 I then take that card and plug it into my laptop and listen to it. It's a little hissy but I think that's to be expected from an old tape. I see other people use Audacity for the music stuff but I don't have that. I do have Adobe Premiere Pro already so I simply brought the file into that, and applied the "De-Noise" filter and set it to "default" (tinkered with other settings but this one gave me the best overall results). The De-Noise filter helped a lot and then I just re-export the song out to a new MP3 and i'm good to go. I'm happy with it so far. Lots of nostalgia hearing these old tapes💛 I'll update my review if anything comes up. Read more
This works great! I have converted numerous cassette tapes to mp3. It’s easy to do and the sound quality for a little tape player is good, too. Read more
Works as advertised!! Read more
