Anyone else using this cassette mp3 player?

Hey guys!

I've been tooling around all summer playing music through this great little cassette with an MP3 player inside of it. Search for "mp3 telecontrol" on amazon or ebay or dealextreme, you can find the kit for about $15 (cassette, remote w/battery, headphones, USB cable, car and wall adapters). It doesn't have a brand name and usually ships from Asia. I love the thing for a few reasons. There's no need for noise reduction, it sounds as crisp as a CD with a low noise floor, as one would expect from a digital source. Nothing is plugged into a line-in jack, which doesn't look that cool walking around with a box. Head alignment has little effect on sound quality, and the belts and/or motors could be shot and this would still play fine. The volume goes up high enough that you could get a little more out of a box if you really wanted to max it out, and the EQ can make some boxes sound better. My 8GB SD cards work fine with it, not sure about 16 gig though.

The one downside I found is that the quality of the heads themselves are a taad hit or miss. I had to return one because one channel was louder than the other, but I've purchased a few since then and they all sound great.

http://youtu.be/vC9WQ6QVQxs

I have the same mp3 cassette. Very simple to use.
It's good that have auto reverse head:
You can rotate cassette side A or B to adjust better sound.

Usually I charge cassette when is connect to my PC.
I charge it for 2-3 hours, that must be enough, but ...
cassette work only 40-50 min. and need to charge again...
Maybe battery has bad, or have small capacity, I don't know...
I try search for replacement on ebay but I find batery with small capacity only...

Please, answered me -
how long you charge your cassette and how long time you can use it?!?

Yes, I have one. I use it merely to test the cassette audio part of a box, before I buy it. Like GM I'm also not impressed by the capacity of the battery and don't use the cassette much for other things than testing.

Yes, I have used one of these, great video description BTW.

The two issues I had were, it didn't work in every radio for some reason and that may have been the radio struggling to line up the drive wheels with the turning wheels on the mp3 cassette and the auto shut off tripping.

But the biggest issue I had was every time I turned it on, it would start with the first song on the list. It had no shuffle feature. So even if I has 500 songs on the SD card I only heard the first handful because it always played them in order from the start.

I'm glad they added a remote control feature to it though, that makes it better for sure.

On the one I had, you could skip songs by fast forwarding or rewinding, I thought that was a cool feature.

Thanks Lasonic! I've read other cassette adapters having this issue as well, that's a bummer. I've seen some wired adapters with little rubber wheels that I think prevent that. The device could certainly be better, I hope someone improves on it. It's also a great solution for cheaper boxes that have no line-in jack, which I have a few of.

It's true, it lacks seek and shuffle, which would be nice, but it hasn't bothered me much. The sound quality beats tapes hands down, and I can do all my playlists on the computer. It sorts by date, so I can sort my songs by tweaking that. I can have a playlist on each card and just swap those in and out. The superior sound quality and time saved not recording everything to tape is great.

Goodman, yeah, they don't last a very long time, it takes 1-2 hours to charge it when completely drained, but only lasts about that long when in use. Their claim of SIX hours on the box is misleading. When I opened one up, it looks like they could've used a larger battery, but whatever. They're so cheap, I just bought a couple more and keep them charged when I'm out and about.

I haven't played with a bluetooth cassette yet, but it would allow you to tether to your smart phone, which would then have all the player capabilities there. They're considerably more expensive, though. I've seen some take bluetooth headphones and install the guts into a cassette adapter. The other downside is that the phone would have to stay close to the box at all times. The mobiBLU mp3 cassette that came out ten years ago was nice, it would be great if it was refreshed with a usable amount of storage space and not have weird software requirements.

Yeah man, Bluetoothing is the way I have chosen to go on allot of my boxes. Here is one of many threads on here: https://boomboxery.com/forum/index.php/topic/14853-blu-tooth-modding-my-collection-next/?hl=bluetooth#entry184763

Yeah, this cheap chinese cassette is based on MOBIBLU DAH 220:
For full review look here: http://www.dansdata.com/dah220.htm

I'm going to try that Lasonic, looks like a good thing to try, too bad I didn't see this before I tore down my box this weekend to replace the belts!

caution said:

I'm going to try that Lasonic, looks like a good thing to try, too bad I didn't see this before I tore down my box this weekend to replace the belts!

Click to expand...

Oh, you'll be in there for one reason or another soon enough!

I was playing around with the remote control for this cassette and discovered some undocumented features, one of which I thought was only available to the button on the cassette.

1. You can use the keypad to enter the track number, which is just the mp3's position relative to the others based on date. This can be handy if you have a few hundred tracks and want to quickly jump around the list. You can wait a couple of seconds after typing in the number for it to jump, or you can press the play/pause button to have it jump immediately.

2. You can seek within tracks! Just hold down the previous track and next track buttons.

3. You can hold down the play/pause button to put it into a hibernate mode. The LED will turn off and the only thing it will respond to is the play/pause button being held down. When it wakes up, it's still at the same EQ setting, volume, track number and position within the track, This avoids having to take the cassette out and use the slider switch to turn it off, and has the added benefit of retaining your settings.

WoW...I never seen those before.....I might get one

Lasonic TRC-920 said:

It didn't work in every radio for some reason and that may have been the radio struggling to line up the drive wheels with the turning wheels on the mp3 cassette and the auto shut off tripping.

Click to expand...

Hey,
I just discovered these things, they're cool but I'm having the same problem with the auto shut off. I thought it may be because the gears in the cassette are just a bit sticky and difficult to turn. Do you think lubing it up or even removing the gears from the cassette could make a difference? Do you even need em?