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I edit audio digitally almost every day. You can use the Goldwave, it will do what you want to do. If you have the money and are technically inclined, get Sonic Foundry's Sound Forge and their Noise Reduction add-in. One of the reasons audio files on disk tend to be so much larger than what you download from the internet is the data rate that they're recorded at. Full CD quality stereo is recorded at a 44.1 khz, 16bit sampling rate or higher. You probably could get away with 22.050 @ 16bit from cassettes because unless they're really good cassettes (that lets out the cassettes that commercial music comes on...) AND you have a really good deck, the fidelity of the source material is going to suck anyway.

Even a $40 sound card will do a good job with audio cassettes as the noise from the cassette is much higher than the noise floor of a recent but cheapo sound card. Use a good quality cassette deck for the source, and keep an eye on the levels into your sound card. Make sure your hard drive is defragmented and that you have lots o room on it. Do a 60 sec recording of nothing and note the disk space it uses. Figure out how much run time you have on your hard drive from that and then leave at least half the drive space available for editing. Pump those cassettes in and out leaving a gap where the tapes start and stop until you run out of half of your drive space. At that point, go through the tunes one by one copying the particular track and then pasting it into a new file that you save.

If you have problems with an older sound card introducing noise, make sure that you don't have any drive cables rubbing on the sound card or that the video card isn't sitting right next to the video card.