I'm a cheap audiofile, so sound quality is important to me, and my tapes and albums are pristine. Over a three year period I digitized around 240 high quality tapes that contained the hits of my album collection. A high quality archival digital copy was my goal. What a chore. I started with my computer, but found an outboard CD recorder to be much faster and more efficient. Here's why. Digital recorders, be it the computer or outboard recorders, can't record musical peaks past 0 DB (There may be some software that would compress the sound, but at a sonic quality cost). They cut off those peaks, reducing the quality of the recording. Vinyl albums and my tapes have significant musical peaks, and the volume level of each album, and sometimes even songs on the album are different, forcing the adjustment of the input recorder volume for each song. This is easier to adjust on an outboard CD recorder. If you don't adjust the volume and just record at a lower but safe level that records the peaks, the song volume changes between songs will be annoying. Some songs will be loud, others will be hard to hear. Sometimes I would be 1/2 way through the song and go over 0 db. My computer took forever to stop and reset to re-record the song. My outboard recorder could be stopped with its remote, and the defective song erased in something like 30 seconds.
An outboard recorder should also deliver higher quality sound because the Analog to Digital converters will be superior to that in a computer. I also purchased a professional recorder that would record on standard blank computer CDs, including CD-RWs, so I could reuse the CDs. Consumer CD recorders require more expensive blank CDs that have a royalty cost in them. I ripped the CD-RW discs into my computer for titleing and archiving onto CD-Rs.
It was a very time consuming process that I undertook because I wanted to archive the tapes, because I have quite a bit of music that still isn't out on CD, and there are all those albums with at most 2 or 3 songs you ever want to listen to again. The albums I really love I own on CD.