Well, without being program-specific... you need to capture the audio from the tape player. If your sound card has stereo inputs (although if it's from the 40s I'm sure stereo is not an issue at this stage) hook up your tape player to these input connex. Play the tape at real-time and capture the music into an audio format in your computer. I would recommend doing one song per file, and not the whole shebang. Save these sound files as .WAV or .AIF, or even .MP3 if you have that option. An audio CD's native format is .AIF, so that would be my first choice. Once they are in this format, you can burn them to a CD like normal...
... I guess I should ask: have you any experience burning audio CDs yet? If not, it's not very difficult...
Back to the stereo issue; since the source will most likely be mono, you have a couple of options.. 1) capture the audio in stereo... this will give you two identical channels, i.e., left and right will have exactly the same information.
or 2) capture only one channel from the tape player... you may find that, even though they're identical, one channel may sound better. Later on, your software may let you expand that one channel into full stereo.
One thing you should watch out for is the input levels from the tape player to the card. Avoid the temptation to turn the tape player volume all the way up... this could cause the sound quality to "clip", giving the sound a staticky, grungy quality.
Experiment with a single song before doing the entire tape.
All in all, it's not rocket science, but it does require a little bit of setup.
If all else fails, you could mail the tape to me, and I'd be happy to do it for you.
Good luck!
