Nuke's got it right, however, if ya want better quality, you'll need a good sound card. Some high end cards have RCA jacks in, most have 1/4" or 1/8" mic jack. either way, a good program to use is soundforge or something similar, so you can cut the song to start and end exactly where you want it. As far as cost, my creativeblaster was about 200 (for basic stuff), but I also have an Echo Layla for multi-input hard disk recording, which is around $600 nowadays.....Echo has a few others that are more expensive, but are great for the band thing; they are also rackmountable & come with a 'mixer' looking software.