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I used to have a lot of tapes that I bought or made years ago, from bands that I would never be able to find again. I thought about running the wires to a tape player to record them, but that's always a messy set up, and if you are recording any more than one tape it can be time consuming. You would end up having your stereo balanced on something just so you could make the wires reach the computer. So then I found an old Sony tape player I swapped out of my car. I held onto it because it still worked, but installing it in a computer was the best use I ever could have put it to.

Computer power supplies divide power into several voltages and one of them is 12V. Car's electrical systems work on 12V, so anything that is supposed to run in a car should work if you want to add it to your computer.

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First, I did research on what would be required. I didn't have the radio's manual, so I found another one online and used it as a guide. I wanted to know how many amps it drew, then multiply that by 12 volts and figure out how many watts it would draw. This probably isn't necessary because in a car you are powering 4 speakers, and in this case I was only using the preamp outputs. I also wanted to find out how many watts I have to spare in my computer. I just tallied up the figures for all the components I have, then decided if I had enough to spare.
After all that was figured out, I had to think about what was required from the radio. You only need to worry about the ground, the ignition and the power wires, all the rest you can cut off or wire tie. I took a Molex power splitter (used to add extra hard drives or optical drives when you are out of power connectors) and cut off the female end. You don't need the red wires, so I put some shrink tubing on them to keep them from shorting out.
This shows what the colors on the wires of a Molex connector correspond to. You will only need the yellow and one of the black wires. I twisted the ignition and the power to the yellow wire, and then I twisted the grounds together. Then once those were connected I tested it.
I had an old 486 computer lying around, so I twisted the wires together and connected the radio to the power. The radio powered right up and stayed on the whole time I was testing it.
Once I knew it worked, I used a pair of helping hands to solder the wires together. I put some heat shrink tubing over the wires before I soldered them. This makes a nice finished connection that won't short out.

These pictures are of the finished product. The second wire is a CD audio splitter that I made out of 1 CD audio cable, and 2 Female CD audio jacks that I pulled off an old sound card.
 

And here is the radio running off the computer's power supply. This turned out pretty well, but squeezing it into any computer is difficult. I ended up turning it on a diagonal and it still took up four 5.25 bays on my computer. I had planned to make an RCA to CD audio cable, but I never got around to it. I ended up using an RCA to 1/8th inch cable to connect it to the soundcard on the outside.

The radio died 2 years after this was finished. The tape mechanism wouldn't stop flipping the tape, so there was no way to record anything anymore. I am planning another project like this one that should be a little more involved and will use the back of an old cd-rom to connect to the power and audio inputs.
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