You gave me a lot of useful information and it sounds very similar to what the others are saying. I need a stereo, a decent sound card, a CD burner, the RCA/stereo cable, and a decent hard drive. I don't think I realized you could do the editing later, after you get the stuff onto the CD. This will help a lot because I usually don't have large chunks of time.
I can't get over how much things have changed since computers came along. Have you ever thought about how people in the music recording industry had to keep up or be left behind? While I was busy raising kids, the entire technology surrounding this stuff changed. Gawd, I feel old! < / rambling >
Well, you can, but IMO you're better off doing your editing before putting it on CD. Usually what I do - and I helped a friend digitize a boatload of LPs and put them on CD, which is similar to what you're doing - is record first, as a single track per reel/LP/cassette/whetever, then take the digitized recording and split it into multiple tracks, clean them up, and burn the individual tracks onto a single CD to recreate the album. That way, you're not burning something raw and unedited to CD, only to burn them again later when you're done tweaking them