I used a tape recorder 40+ years ago computers were starting no cd do they make any device that can do what a cassette recorder or reel to reel recorder does? You could use a computer but kinda big smartphone has no input jack. I guess what I need is a digital recorder with input and output jack same price range as a cassette recorder. Are you trying to use an old computer with CLOAD for example to do a cassette load, and looking for a modern recorder that is low cost to interface with old computer? Also what is your budget?

Back in the early 1990S I still had my TRS-80 Model 1 with 16k RAM and was able to CLOAD using a small boom box tape player/recorder to load and save Basic programs to cassette.

Biggest issue your going to face with modern digital recorders is that they have a sample rate to them and so if your using a modern digital voice recorder with say an older computer that loaded originally from cassette tapes as an option, your going to run into troubles because the sample rate of modern recorders are probably going to cause data loss/corruption since the cassette CLOAD option back in the day was a magnetic tape analog recorder ( lossless as long as a good recording ) with no sample rate. The wave form is read in and converted to digital as an analog input. Binary was input as 0 and 1's by the analog waveform where amplitude above a specific threshold was considered a 1 and anything below that threshold a 0. The volume if set wrong on the cassette player would cause for load issues due to this threshold requirement. Older computers had ability to control start/stop of cassette play/record. At the time I had a more modern tape player/recorder boom box. If I entered CLOAD and pressed play fast enough it wouldnt time out and it would load my Basic program off of the cassette tape.

Im thinking the older computer listening to a load of data from a modern digital recorder is going to be like when you talk through a fan thats running and  say "Luke Im Your father" where the message is time sliced into chunks due to the fan blade blocking your voice at timed intervals and the older computer isnt going to be able to error correct like the human ear/brain can, so the noise of the sample rate using a digital recording to say MP3 etc its going to crash trying to load from it. If you look at a analog recording and a digital MP3 recording on an oscilloscope you can see the difference, but many human ears cant tell the difference between analog and digital audio sources. To a computer though it reads the wave form and so it sees the chopped segments of audio as a result of the sample rate.

Surprisingly Walmart has a cassette player that has aux jacks that should work with older computers for saving/loading to and from cassette. If your planning on using some old tapes from the 70s or 80s, best of luck. I had cassettes for my TRS-80 and as the tapes aged the reliability of the data worsened. Cassettes with dates on them of 1981 for example were failing in 1991 when they were only 10 years old and they were kept in their plastic binders that the tapes would snap into and kept in a cool dry location that was dust free and away from magnets. https://www.walmart.com/ip/873878?wmlspartner=wlpa&adid=22222222227031837056&wl0=&wl1=g&wl2=c&wl3=59242030832&wl4=pla-50620418455&wl5=1021892&wl6=&wl7=&wl8=&wl9=pla&wl10=8175035&wl11=online&wl12=873878&wl13=&veh=sem#about-itemThere are digital audio recorders which perform the same function, and can record and playback recorded audio.

Dave: MP3 files are a common way to find old Cassette-loading software 'distributed' for older cassette-loading systems through you-know-what kind of sites. You load the MP3 in say Audacity and output the audio through Line Out directly to the cassette port of say a Commodore 64. (easiest being those systems that used Phono cords, though you can find adapters for other system types).

Remember that while the Cassette is recording analog data  it's not recording a perfectly continuous recording of the audio. While the record head might be producing a continuous signal, data is lost instantly during the recording process, largely based on the quality of the tape. as a result of this older PCs that used Audio Cassettes would tend to store very little data across an entire cassette, with a lot of extra data being used for error correction as well as to ensure reliability even with the crappy Ferric tape that everybody and their dog was using because it was like 80 cents for a tape or whatever.

There is no replacement for the standard cassette tape recorder.
No digital device of any kind as all the the features you want. At a price within reason. Try Walmart.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/AmpliVox-Sound-Systems-Cassette-Recorder-Four-Station-Listening-Center/11962151


The price is nice and when used with headphones the sound quality is excellent. Of course is has some background hiss and the upper frequency response is only about 12 Khz. But he size, ease o use and economy make it still the best choice even after 40 years.  Quote

There is no replacement for the standard cassette tape recorder.
No digital device of any kind as all the the features you want. At a price within reason.

What feature are you supposing that they require that is not met by this device?

Remember that while the Cassette is recording analog data  it's not recording a perfectly continuous recording of the audio. While the record head might be producing a continuous signal, data is lost instantly during the recording process, largely based on the quality of the tape. as a result of this older PCs that used Audio Cassettes would tend to store very little data across an entire cassette, with a lot of extra data being used for error correction as well as to ensure reliability even with the crappy Ferric tape that everybody and their dog was using because it was like 80 cents for a tape or whatever.

Cassette tape drive

User data was originally stored on cassette tape. Radio Shack's model CTR-41 cassette recorder was included with the US$599 package. The software-based cassette tape interface was very slow and erratic; Green described it as "crummy ... drives users up the wall", and the first issue of 80 Micro had three articles on how to improve cassette performance. It was sensitive to audio volume changes, and the machine gave only the very crudest indication as to whether the correct volume was set, via a blinking character on screen while data was being loaded. To find the correct volume, one would sometimes have to attempt to load a program once, adjusting volume until the machine picked up the data, then reset the machine, rewind the tape and attempt the loading again. Users quickly learned to save a file three or more times in hopes that one copy would prove to be readable. Automatic gain control or indicator circuits could be constructed to compensate for this (the owner's manual provided complete circuit diagrams for the whole machine, including the peripheral interfaces, with notes on operation).

An alternative tape interface could receive transmissions from the BBC's Chip Shop programme in the UK, which broadcast software for SEVERAL different microcomputers over the radio. A special program loaded using the conventional tape interface was needed to access the custom interface. Tandy eventually replaced the CTR-41 unit with the CTR-80 which had built-in AGC circuitry (and no volume control). This helped the situation, but tape operation was still unreliable.

TRS-80s with Level I BASIC read and wrote tapes at 250 bits per second (31.25 bytes per second); Level II BASIC doubled this to 500 bits per second (62.5 bytes per second). Some programmers wrote machine-language programs that would increase the speed to up to 2,000 bits per second without a loss of reliability.

For loading and storing data, no hardware controller existed. Instead, the processor created the sound itself by switching the output voltage between three states, creating very crude sine wave audio.

The first models of the Model I also had problems reading from the cassette drives. Tandy eventually offered a small board which was installed in a service center to correct earlier models. The ROMs in later models were modified to correct this.

DaveLembke,
Years ago, can't remember the date, I used a standard cassette tape to load my Altair computer.A very earl  version of Microsoft basic took  kilobytes.
The original tapes ran at 300 baud. Later,I made a home brew interface that could write and read at 1200 baud. I was about to push it to 4800 baud and that was the upper limit. I by them was using a CRT monitor I I wrote the stuff to the lower part of the screen. I had a checksum and if it was good, I would run the program.
Inside Basic were commands to write and read programs I copied from computer magazines of that era.
I think this was about 1976. Not sure about that.

I used a tape recorder 40+ years ago computers were starting no cd do they make any device that can do what a cassette recorder or reel to reel recorder does? You could use a computer but kinda big smartphone has no input jack. I guess what I need is a digital recorder with input and output jack same price range as a cassette recorder.