Hey Noisedude
I greatly appreciate the advice you gave me and I will look into that. What would a mini-mixer cost and could I plug that into my ... uhmm .... well ... how best to put this .... Integrated Soundcard (Ouch!). Okay, don't freak out, I know, I know.
I suppose to be fair I should give a little background.
My wife has some music (already on CD) which she purchased from a company that sell it to make a relaxation or guided meditation CD. We will eventually go to a professional studio to get it all recorded and mixed correctly. However, we want to make a couple of CDs to test what background music would work best with certain scripts. The whole point of it is that we want to keep the cost down, and have something decent (nothing professional) to test on willing guinea pigs (ourselves and our family)

. We didn't want to spend $60 an hour plus the master, and firewire hardrive to find out that the scripts suck or the background music does not go with the script we made.
My wife wanted (get this now) to buy a Kareoke Machine speak along while the music played, and then (if you are faint of heart please don't read the following it might give you a heart attack) ... okay ready? and then she wanted to have an off the shelf hand held tape player record what was comming out of the Kareoke machine.
Now that you are disgusted with us. I was able to convince my wife that we could do it on our computer by buying a microphone (did a little research found out I needed a mic preamp) a preamp and some software and everything would sound decent. Well, at least ten times better than what she was trying to do, and for less money than she was going to spend on Kareoke machine.
Hence the whole emphasis on Low cost. Trust me I want to go out and buy the $300 software, plus the mixer, amps, another kick-ass computer, a keyboard, and an electric guitar. I don't need any encouragement in that department ( I own two acoustic guitars, and my wife own a clarinet and a piano - which weights a ton and its a pain to move).
So bottom line I need to have something that will work with my existing Integrated Souncard (which is not great but not bad - Dell), and that will not cost me a lot of money plus sounds better than recording on a hand held tape recorder. So what do you guys think? Can I do that for less than $200 total? I figured $50 for the preamp, $99 for the mic, and another $50 for the mixing software (Audacity).
I also wanted to thank all of you guys for giving me great advice.
Just wandered into a tape recording mixer at my local Guitar Center see what you think
http://www.guitarcenter.com/buyersguide/bg_c/page57.cfm