How I Did It ………First, I gathered up my cartridges (and my cassette tapes as well) alphabetized them by artist, and filed them in shoe boxes that I ultimately stacked next to my desk so I could work on them over time. Settling in to clean out desk drawers, catch up on paperwork, and chat on the phone, I committed myself to opening my MP3 program for a long run.My dinosaur-aged players for cassettes and cartridges have direct audio output jacks. Those are the jacks for RCA-type audio cables. The other cable end plugs into a computer’s microphone port or sound card input. Connecting player to computer, I used a free program called Audacity to record the music to my hard drive so it could be turned from analog to digital. Audacity is easy to use and a multi-tasker. In fact, it removes static and crackles from the music while turning it into MP3 files. It’s available for Linux, PC and Mac. If I wanted to, I could’ve spent a bundle on professional editing software, and that’s great if I were editing tracks, adding effects, and so forth. But all I wanted was to move tunes from plastic to digital. Having followed instructions with Audacity, I opened iTunes and had to make some choices in Edit, Preferences before I could import the newly digitalized music to my collection. Storing it all in iTunes lets me export stuff to my MP3 player or burn my own CDs. According to copyright laws