Debian Recording cassette to mp3 tracks howto

Hi,

I wanted to learn how to record from my tapes and make some mp3 tracks of some music to carry around.

Ok. First how to get the music from my tape player to the computer?

The sound card built in to my Motherboard has 3 jacks. This is standard.
1) speaker out
2) line in
3) microphone in

Now both the speaker out and the line in take the same kind of plug -
a 3.5mm stereo plug.
You can tell that a plug is a stereo plug rather than mono plug
if it has 2 black lines printed on the metal plug!

Where to get one.
I tried RadioShack. I didn't communicate well with the guy at RadioShack.
I then found the part in a small computer parts store.
It was called
Phillips FYC
Audio AV-965
3.5mm stero plug to 3.5mm stereo plug mini audio cable 12ft
Fung Ying Corp
Brooklyn NY 11236
Made in China. It cost me $10.00.

Then I plugged it in to the phono out on my dual cassete stereo cassete player through a
phone to 3.5mm converter.

I then inserted a cassette amd turned on the cassette system and then didn't hear anything through the computer speakers. I tried many things. I fiddled with
kmix and with alsamixer
shoved everything on I could. Nothing worked.
The i tried to create a file using some random commands from googling the internet such as
dd bs=10 /dev/dsp > sample.au (who knows what that does?)
then i tried to listen to that
cat sample.au > /dev/audio or /dev/dsp
I got nowhere.

The i tried
mplayer sample.au
Of course it ignored the stupid file sample.au,
however suddenly glorius music came out of my speakers = sound from the cassete.

I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THAT DID!

Anyway then i wanted to capture the output. Googled uselessly.
Then miracles

SOX!
i did man of sox and discovered "play" and "rec" commands.

Thus
I started the cassette playing then

1) rec cassetee_sidea.wav

recorded a nice side - I stopped it when the side was over.

2) play cassette_sidea.wav
plays it nicely.

Next I will learn how to create a set of mp3s from each side of the cassete.