"making and giving out CD's is not quite the same as the old process of making cassettes and for one's own personal use"

isn't it? - think you're on dangerous ground with that one M.Ted!

Anyway, we'll assume that these are legit recordings:

For PC I would recommend something like Cool Edit to do the chopping up. Sound forge is O.K. (great for processing), but it's edit facilities are a bit lame. (try taking a five minute song and cutting two seconds of silence off the begining. It takes ages, as it deletes one sample at a time and then shuffles everything back!)

Without hearing the tapes I don't really know what to suggest for cleaning up the results. Mini disk is generally pretty clean anyway. Normalize peak levels to about -6 dB (so you've still got a bit of headroom) - if the tapes are really noisy, try to find a section of just noise. You can then use this to make a profile of unwanted frequencies that you can then strip out of the whole file. You may want to compress the results slightly for a punchier sound.

Hope that helps.

EJ