OK Kevin, this is SO straightforward that it can't possibly work properly, but let's give it a try.

Connect your cassette player or CD Player to the Line In/Audio In socket on your sound card. Don't worry too much at this point whether it's mono or stereo - it'll probably end up mono anyway.

From the Start Menu in Win95 use the Run and Browse buttons to find the Sound Recorder in your Windows Directory. My folder was named SNDREC32.EXE. Double click this file to open up Sound Recorder. Go to File / Properties / Convert Now and select something modest such as 8 KHz 16 Bit Mono. I don't know whether it is strictly needed but do the same process by selecting Edit / Audio Properties / Customise.

Once you've changed these settings perform your first Wave Recording for 60 seconds only. Play it back through your normal speakers and check that it sounds OK'ish. Then Save the file to disc. A 60 second recording at the chosen rate will chew up 16 kbits per second or 960 kb in total. (Let's say 1 Meg per minute). You'll then have a pretty good idea of how many minutes of music you can store on your site - at that recording rate.

You can then experiment by going back to the settings in Sound Recorder and record some small snippets at (say) 4 Khz 8 Bits. At this point it won't sound much better than an old Edison phonograph, but you'll be able to store so many more minutes of songs, plus your listeners won't require really fast modems to hear your songs. The converse is clearly going to happen if you select higher bandwidth and sampling rates.

I could go into more detail now about the next steps of converting to Real Audio format (hopefully the easy part) but I figure that you might as well conquer Step 1 first. Let me know how you get on. Best wishes, John