. . where I'll need to be able to play cassette tapes. Tried out my old Kenwood dual deck player last night. It hadn't been used for a couple of years and I got the result I expected - it worked - but not quite right due to stiff mechanism.

This morning I opened it up to see if I could clean and lube, but when I examined the play deck I saw a gear with missing teeth - looks like I had a scrapper.

Headed out to where I usually buy my audio stuff to see if I could get a new one, but stopped by a Circuit City just to see if they had anything. Hardly any music stuff there anymore, just acres of flat screen TVs, notebook computers and packaged videos.

My regular guy assured me that tape decks were dead and gone - that he had 50 requests for them and no decks - advised me to get what I had repaired and transfer everything to hard disk or DVD.

Checked on the Internet and found there were plenty. They were all dual deck but that's what my old one was so I ordered one. It'll be here in plenty of time and I'm sure it cost less than a repair job on the old one would.

Now the question.

Eventually I'm going to want to transfer some cassettes and some vinyl to CD. Any recommendations there?

I presume I can do it through a PC - I've got a Windows 2000 machine here with the usual VIA AC'97 sound and a CD writer. Will that do? And what is convenient software for this job?