What tape drive would you recommend?

[Tony Hammitt]

Randy Rathbun wrote:
> 
> One final thing, there are some decent 4mm drives floating around on Ebay.
> 
> Also, before I forget - anyone know of a program/method that will allow me to
> write MP3s to a 4mm tape? I dont mean to play in a DAT drive - I want to stream
> the files off of them so I can just insert a tape, load up XMMS and have a nice
> couple of hours of music. There is a thing for Windows that will let you do
> this, but I have not found squat for Linux.
> 
> Randy

I figure you could do something with tar.  MP3's are just flat files
so you could write them out to tape then read them into /tmp.  What
you do with them then depends on the software (I have no experience
with it whatsoever, I don't use MP3's or even have a sound card in my
linux boxes) but if xmms can take piped input, you could just say
'tar xvf /dev/st0 | xmms -' or some such.

Nope, forget that...  According to freshmeat.net, there is no mp3
player that can take streaming data.  This _is_ open source, though.
I don't think it could be that hard to write a patch for some software
to play from stdin instead of a file stream.  It may have to read in
the entire file to decode it properly, but as long as it then blocked
stdin until the file was done playing, you could use the 'tar' approach.

Done spouting off now.  Time for bed.

Regards,

Tony