Archive cassette tapes before they're gone forever.

Want to take your cassette-tape collection from the '70s and '80s and burn the music to a CD? Today we'll show you how to take your old cassette tapes and burn them to a CD before it's too late.

What you'll need to do is connect a tape player to your sound card's line-in terminal with a 1/8" mini-jack and record the contents of your tape as a WAV file. To do this, we recommend using the free version of MusicMatch 6.0. Just set MusicMatch to record the line-in channel, press play on your tape deck, and then press the record button on the MusicMatch Jukebox.

Once you've done that, you'll be converting the analog sound on the tape into digital audio -- breaking it down into numbers. Welcome to the world of digitizing.

Once you've recorded your WAV file, it's very easy to make an audio CD-R using software designed for that task. We recommend a $99 program called Spin Doctor from Roxio. It's part of Roxio's Easy CD Creator 5. You'll also need a CD-R drive, of course. When you've finished gathering all the necessary hardware and software, read this available. Pro Tools is the industry standard among recording professionals worldwide. It's not a user-friendly program but you can download a copy to edit and clean up WAV files before burning them to CD.