I use a program called RipVinyl.  It cost me $7.00 USD and was actually designed to copy songs from vinly records but is excellent for tapes as well.  This will get them to your hard drive.  You can use one of quite a few commercial (Nero, Easy CD Creator, etc.) and freeware programs to then copy them to CD.  Check out ripvinyl.com.

You can get 20 to 25 songs per CD depending on their length.  If you want to convert them to MP3 you can get from 150 to 180 per CD but they can then only be played back on a computer or a DVD player or special CD player that will handle MP3s.  You also lose some quality when you compress them to MP3 format.  I convert mine at 192 kbps and am comfortable with the quality.
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: sharon gofstein 
  To: [log in to unmask] 
  Sent: Sunday, November 23, 2003 8:14 PM
  Subject: [PCSOFT] cassettes to cd


  Hi,

  We're pretty clueless. We have about 2000-3000 cassettes that we've bought over the years...and years. We want to convert the cassettes to CD using our PC. Can you help us keep our music and get us back into what we used to call 'the spare room' and can you dumb down the response for us a bit?

  Thanks,

  Sharon Gofstein

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