I believe that "Toast" is the Mac version of "Easy CD Creator," or vice-versa. The products were made by Adaptec, until the company reorganized and the consumer products function of the firm became Roxio.
I use Easy CD Creator Deluxe, and it's pretty good (cost me $50 on sale). I record a WAV file onto my hard drive, probably 500 megabytes for a 30-minute recording. Easy CD creator reads the WAV file for silent spots, and puts breaks at each spot and then allows you to accept or reject the suggested breaks, one by one (I found this process aggravating, so I think I'll just accept the breaks where they're suggested and not mind if the break isn't exactly at the beginning of a song). I notices that my cassette deck puts out a signal that's a bit too weak for computer recording, so I have to play around with that.
My kids keep begging my turntables from me, so I don't have a turntable to try on my computer. I'd certainly prefer to record direct to my hard drive, rather than going to a cassette first.
One thing about connecting to a sound card - don't overload it. It would not be a good idea to patch from your headphone jack or speaker terminals direct to your sound card. You could be having fried sound card for breakfast tomorrow. Sound cards will generally accept the "line out" signal from receivers and most electronic components, but need a preamplifier to make use of the signal from magnetic phonograph cartridges.

-Joe Offer-