thought sending output from arecord to tape drive would work, but it doesn't

[Brent Harding]

				What is it that makes recording and playback to and from a tape drive
not work, as it'd seem linux wshould be capable of? I once tried arecord
from alsa to do this, figuring I really could send the output to any device
I wanted, to my surprise, it won't work. I tried sox, making another device
file /dev/tape.wav, and it won't play or record from it either. Is there a
way to make this work with the ftape floppy tape drivers? I thought things
work just like a regular disk, with the exception of not being able to
delete, which is OK here, just record over, or fast forward to the end and
continue. I suppose this really isn't the intended purpose, but many linux
utilities are able to do things with stdin and stdout that may not have
been thought of before. I figured, using gzip with the recording process
would give lossless compression to store more than I ever could before, to
make for the ideal removable media, for linux compatibility, and that I
already have it. I bet, however, any tape I could dump raw wave out, or
gzipped wave out to will never play in windows or anything else, but that
doesn't matter much.