Harpgirl, I don't think any of them are inexpensive yet. The Hewlett Packard is $399 at Best Buy now, cheaper and no doubt better than my version. It is not an absolute necessity, but to get the best out of your old records, you need a good program to clean them up, like Adaptec's Easy CD Creator. That is another $90 or so. If you have good quality records, with little or no noise, you might be happy without that, but I figured as long as I was going to do it, I would do it first class. I have had the CD writer for several months, but just got the Easy CD Creator, and have only done one CD so far, and that was a direct CD to CD, which worked fine. They recommended that as a first attempt. I will give you a progress report when I do something more adventurous, probably not until after Christmas. Oh, and you need a fairly good amount of temporary space on your hard drive to load the songs you are working with, about 10mb per minute, or about 750mb per CD. If you are just recording straight from cassette to CD with no cleaning, then you do not need the space, but that is also a riskier proposition, from what I understand. Perhaps there will be someone reading this who knows a lot more about it than I do.

Oh yeah, harpgirl, by the way, I do have the Kathy and Carol lp! 8-) So many good songs there, Carter's Blues, Fair Beauty Bright, Green Rocky Road, Wondrous Love . . .