Crosley Music Writer

We acquired a Crosley Music Writer.
First Impressions: cheesy.
It looks better than it functions.
The idea is good, ie., all in one player and easily convert media to CD.

So anyway,
It's been just sitting here not getting any use, so I decided to try to convert some of my oddball cassettes over to CD with it.

Here are some of my notes, in case anybody else out there is thinking about doing this.

1. The cassette player grinds or is noisy when in use, but this doesn't affect the CD recording.

2. The CD player spins and spins for a long time and I had to wait until it stops spinning before I proceeded. I suspect this was the cause of a few recording failures when switching sides of the cassette and starting a new track. This makes me wonder how long the CD player will continue to work.

3. Sometimes recording failed anyway, or just stopped for no reason and I had to try again with a new track or different CD disc. If record is working, the CD player will make noise and the display will say "recording" and shows track number and time/length of recording. If it fails/stops the display will say "phono" and the CD player may go quiet if it ever stops spinning.

4. I was using CD-R disks. Should be able to use CD-RW also, but I didn't have any of those.

5. It tends to eat the cassettes, so gotta be watchful of that. It didn't actually break the tape, so I untangled a few by hand and rewound in a different cassette player and then tried again with success.

6. The instruction manual is good.
7. The end result, if you can get that far, is a good quality recording.
8. The format is audio CD or *.cda file type. So rip as you would your other music CD's.

What oddball cassettes did I convert so far?

1. Musical Acupuncture, by Janalea Hoffman.

Still available on CD at rhythmicmedicine.com Side 1 is music with vocal instruction and Side 2 is music only. I love this cassette/CD. I can feel the tones on my body.

Here's part of the cassette cover scan:


2. Environments, by Syntonic Research, Inc.

These I don't think you can get anymore in any format. There is some info about them at wiki. Environments 1 is the best ocean recording I've ever found. Puts me right there. The real deal. No music, just the sound of the ocean. Ultimate thunderstorm is good too--realistic.

Portion of cassette cover scans:




3. Peaceful Evening, by David & Steve Gordon.
I always liked this cassette. Just seemed to be a cut above the rest of my stash of that genre.
Lots of birds, crickets, etc., with piano.
I don't have a cassette cover for this, but a CD of same name can be found at Amazon.



cduniverse
Marks some tracks as CD only and this looks correct. I don't have Tracks 8, 9, and 10, but I do have track 11.

When I open my CD recording in Audacity, (after rip and convert to mp3) it looks like 5 tracks on one cassette side and 3 tracks on the other cassette side.
Nightflyer (Track 7 on CD) is my favorite song and the longest one (10:22).

Trivia:
Googling
david gordon steve gordon "vital body marketing"
get an old Mother Jone's Magazine May 1985 ad in google books.