SRS

Belkin (here in the UK) do several leads (the one I used (prior to purchasing a Creative Extigy sound card that has stereo minijack inputs - Digital phono (RCA) - and optical input/output and highly recommended) was actually put out for transferring video to usb and consist of three phono (RCA) jacks - 1) Video signal plus left and right audio to USB at the time this was the only lead available locally through audio only ones are now instore.

The signal from the record deck is too low to feed into the computer (or even a normal amp input - the phono input on an audio amp has extra pre amplification) and although you could take the output from your amplifier (e.g. tape output) the quality of signal would depend on the quality of the amp...... with a purpose built pre-amplifier (should be available from good h-fi store) less noise would be introduced to the signal (another reason why it's best not to use the "line input" on your sound card is that most sound card pe-amps are very noisy.

If recording from Cassette - the output from the cassette deck should be OK as it has a higher "line level"

A pre amp is a small box (some battery and some mains powered - or both) that amplifies the signal from the pick-up and increases what is a very low signal to a line-level signal suitable to be input into an amp/PC etc - not very expensive and very quiet in operation (depending on quality of unit)

Initially you could take a phono to phono stereo lead from the tape output of your amp to the Belkin lead and into your computer's usb port - from this you could record either cassettes or Records onto the computer via sound forge etc. Clean them up and save them as 16 bit wav files which you could then write them to CD. - If you are happy with the results a pre-amp wouldn't be needed.

hope that's a help and makes sense to you

cheers Pete