Another failed plan, I think

There's a long story with this.  A couple of years ago, I found an audiobook of Nerilka's Story by Anne McCaffrey at Goodwill.  Read by Anne Herself, so I could finally know how she really meant all those names to be pronounced (okay, at least all the names in this story - so Brekke will by a mystery for a while).  But, it's on audio cassette, and the only working cassette player is in my car, so the whole thing got put on hold. 

A few years later (Last year, in other words), a friend mentioned a gadget that looks like an old cassette Walkman, that will play a cassette and convert that sound straight to MP3 on an attached flash drive.  Off I go to Amazon and look at said gadgets.  Got distracted and put the project on hold again.  Then, this month, I decided that it's time to get this audiobook, and a few assorted music cassettes, finally converted to digital.  Because the CD of the audiobook is $$$, and the music cassettes are obscure stuff that will never be on CD or MP3 or whatever. 

While trying to figure out which of the many variations of the gadget to get, I realized two things.  A, the main complaint seems to be that the cassette player portion is the weak link, both in durability and in sound quality.  And B, there's a related gizmo that will connect an existing stereo with cassette player to your hard drive, via USB, and skip the whole cheaply-made cassette player gadget thing.  Plus, half the price ($12 or so less.)  So, I spent a whole afternoon digging the stereo out of a closet and making a space for it within connecting distance of the hard drive.  And then realized we had to go spend $15 on wire to connect the speakers to the stereo, since they're on a unique hookup and we seem to have lost the original wire. 

And, a week later, I have finally plugged in the stereo and put in a cassette to test it (with no speakers hooked up, because why waste the wire if the thing won't work).  Yeah.  Neither of the two cassette decks seem to work - they play for a few seconds, reverse, play a few seconds, repeat.  And one of the 3 CD trays doesn't seem to work either. 

So.  Barring the engineer of the house being able to fix at least one cassette deck, looks like I'll be returning the $15 of speaker wire, and buying the more expensive gizmo and hoping the cassette player doesn't crap out.  Bleh.