You may have to shell some $$ out for a good capture program that will also allow you to clean your recordings up. Someone above mentioned Cool Edit....that's a great program, but it's been sold to Adobe in the last year, so you can't get the cheap version any more.
When Syntrillium owned the program, you could get a version for about $50 that was great. The pro version was about $200 or $300. Now that Adobe has it, it's called Adobe Audition and the $300 version is all there is.
You might try a soundcard makers website. Something like Creative or other large maker. They usually bundle capture software with their product and may have versions available for download that will allow you to save full size files and do cleanup as well.
If you plan to do alot of cassette - CD recording, I'd suggest getting a seperate component tape deck just for your computer. Having RCA outputs will help a great deal with the noise on the capture. Running through the headphone output is giving you a slightyly amplified signal, which boosts noise (hiss and such). Capture from a line level output (RCA) will give you a much cleaner signal to work with.
It doesn't make sense that you couldn't capture with the first program you used. Did you verify that the line in input on your PC was selected in the windows mixer? Double click the speaker icon in your sys tray and select options/properties, then check the recording button and click OK. Make sure the Line In (or if you're using XP, the "what u hear" slider will work). If the wrong one is checked, you won't get a signal.
