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I am attempting to take MUSIC from a stereo tape deck, put on the hard drive and then burn to cd.  I have a 1/4 inch mono plug with adapter to RCA cable jacks COMING from the headphone jack on the tape deck.  Going into the computer via Microphone jack I have a 1/8 inch mono plug with adapter to the RCA cable coming from tape deck.  I am using Audacity as the software to capture the signal.  As you can determine from what I have said, I am only getting one side of the stereo signal onto the hard drive.  My question is: If I had stereo PLUGS on both ends (one at the tape deck and one into the computer) that adapted to the RCA cable, would I be able to capture both channels?  If stereo plugs will not solve my problem, what recommendations would you offer to allow me to get GOOD CDs for my efforts?  I only have one other input in addition the microphone jack on the computer.  It is a 1/8 inch jack labeled line in.

Thanks in advance for all your help.[/size]You need to use line-in.  You can't get stereo sound with the microphone jack.  Get an external amplifier (try getting a small one from Radio Shack), and connect the tape player to that.  Then connect the amplifier (from tape out) to the line-in jack.  You also can do the same thing with a record player too.