[Cyber Akuma]

I am trying to help someone convert some old cassette tapes to CD. I figured the best way to do this would be to plug the headphone jack of their cassette player into their laptop and use Audacity to capture them.

Issue is, the audio sounds HORRIBLE on the PC. It's not the laptop's speakers as I tried headphones, and it's not the source as from the cassette player itself it sounds fine. I tried messing with the sound device settings to adjust gain and volume as well as sample rate but it didn't help.

I assume the laptop's audio input is just poor quality, especially since it's intended for microphones, not music. So I figured a good bet would be to get a USB based audio capture device/sound card.

So I wanted to ask if anyone had any recommendations. I am looking for something cheap, I saw hundreds in the $10-20 range, and while I know that those aren't going to be the best of quality, again, the source are old cassette tapes that were recorded at home, so I don't really need something of amazing or high-end quality as it would just be overkill and expensive. Is there anything in a decent price range that would take an audio input in stereo for the sake of recording it at decent quality?