Transferring a tape to a CD

My wife is getting ready for a reunion and needs a tape of praise music that was made when she was in college transferred to CD. So, how do you go about doing that? Here's one answer if you use Windows XP. And, here's some pointers I learned while I was doing it.

• Audacity's a pretty nice little program for free.
• Put some thought into where you select the background noise for the noise cancellation step. In this case, if you select too early the recording hasn't actually started so you won't cancel out any noise. Be sure and pick a dead spot that is being recorded. It's an art getting the noise cancellation right, so play with it a little bit using a small selection.
  
• When it comes time to make tracks, you can select a song and then do a 'Save selection as wav'. This will save copying it into another project. Also, if you hover over the edge of your current selection the cursor will turn into a hand. Using it, you can change the start/end of the selection, and can use it to leapfrog tracks by grabbing the beginning and making it the end of the next track. You will save a lot of time this way.