Hi John,

You are on the right track but they left out some important information.  So, let's start at the very beginning.

Make the physical connection:
On the back of your cassette player you should find four "female" RCA jacks.  You want to use the "out" jacks; one should be red and the other white.  You will need a splitter cable (also known as a Y-jack).  It has two "male" RCA jacks (red & white) then tappers down into a small stereo "male" plug.  This needs to be the same size as the "line-in" jack on your computer; most likely 1/8 inch.  This makes the physical connection so the sound can get from you cassette deck to the "line-in" buss on your PC.

Next, you need to actually record the sound.  This is the challenging part and depends entirely on your computer's sound card and drivers.

I use MP3 Maker to burn CDs to other formats, but I've never used it for recording.  I bought a small program years ago that works great, but the principles are the same.

I have MP3 Maker 12 Deluxe so I'll use that for specifics.  After you bring up MP3 Maker, look at the very bottom of the screen to find the rewind, stop, play, fast forward, and the red dot (record) buttons. 

Hit the red dot record button to open the Recording dialog window.  This is your main interface, but you will also need to open your volume dialog from within Windows.  How to open this depends on your version of Windows, but you should be able to find it starting in Control Panel.  There may also be a small speaker icon in your lower right-hand corner of Windows.  You have to play with the volume settings for Master and Line-In while your cassette deck is playing to find the optimum volume setting.  It should be as loud as possible without clipping or distorting.  Also, you don't want to record the other normal computer sounds (dings, bells, "you've got mail", etc.) so you may want ot turn those all off if they get onto your recording.  Some times all you get is hiss, or cannot control the volume.  It can get ugly. Just keep working at it and you should figure it out.  Remember also, in Windows XP, there is a "record" volume set and a "playback" volume set.  I've had computers where I got sound on the first try and another computer where I never did get any sound no matter what I did.  Good luck!

The next place to look at is the "Format" button.  This is where you decide the quality of recording you want.  I always choose the highest possible options.  For MP3 Maker, this is 320 kBit and 44100 Sample rate.  Also, I never use variable bit rates (I have no idea what that is, but it doesn't sound good to me).

Keep in mind that the better the quality recording, the bigger the resultant MP3 file will be.  If you are limited on disk space, you need to choose a lower quality recording, or you could purchase one of the many inexpensive USB external hard disk drives available now for not a lot of money.

The last option of interest is the "timer controlled recording".  This lets you control the length of time your recording will be.  If your cassette is 20 minutes on side A, you set set the recording to last for 22 minutes.  This prevents you from filling up your hard disk drive with a five hour recording because you forgot to turn off the recording.

Once you have MP3 file created, then you can edit it using the sound editor.  You should see your recording in the main MP3 Maker window.  Right-click it and choose "Edit tracks in MAGIX music editor..."

This program allows you to trim off the silence at the beginning and end of your file, process out hiss, clicks, etc., improve stereo, improve equalization, etc.  It's actually quite powerful.  You can even use it to split your MP3 file of multiple songs from the cassette into individual MP3 files (one for each song).

That's pretty much it!  Hope this helps you!