What is the maximum data density of a cassette ?

[aneeshm]

How much data can you store on an old-style cassette tape ? Does anybody have any idea ? If I decided to write a program to convert digital data into analog sound , then use a standard speaker output to microphone input of a recorder to record it , and to use the tape recorder's output piped to the input of the computer's microphone as input , could it work ?

I've asked this question before , but I'd like to get an idea of how much I can store exactly on one cassette .

[BlackCat]

I really hope that this is a pure academic question - it compares to question if using pre gutenberg methods would be a sensible way of making books.

[Kuciwalker]

How much data can you store on an old-style cassette tape ? Does anybody have any idea ? If I decided to write a program to convert digital data into analog sound , then use a standard speaker output to microphone input of a recorder to record it , and to use the tape recorder's output piped to the input of the computer's microphone as input , could it work ?

Work to do what?

[aneeshm]

Work as in made to be able to store data . How much could be fit into one cassette ?

[Kuciwalker]

How much data can you store on an old-style cassette tape ? Does anybody have any idea ? If I decided to write a program to convert digital data into analog sound , then use a standard speaker output to microphone input of a recorder to record it

Will store the data on the tape, sure, except it's now in analog form. You can't really quantify it.

[aneeshm]

And yes - it is purely academic .

[BlackCat]

Originally posted by aneeshm
And yes - it is purely academic .

Though, your question isn't actually answerable without specifics. Casettes comes in many qualities and the same goes for the recording maschines.

[Dis]

I would think background noise would interfere with the conversion of audio into digital data. You would need some way to record it as digital sound, not analog sound I would think. Similar to a CD. But instead of a laser picking up 0's and 1's, some kind of sound recognition software would pick up 0's and 1's.

In any case, I shudder to think of the days's on my (actually my brother's) commodore 64 waiting for Bruce Lee to load. If you accidently bumped the data cassette it would ruin the load, but you wouldn't find out until the end that it was ruined. Then you'd have to start all over.

Actually though, those days were pretty good. But I couldn't imagine having to wait that long to play a game now days.

[Dr. A. Cula]

Back when I was still using a Sinclair Spectrum, I remember doing a count and found out that I could store about 600 kilobytes on a regular analog audio cassette. The largest data file I could load was 48 kilobytes (the entire available RAM for my machine) and it would load in about 5 minutes.

Yes, background noise was an issue, and it was horrible on low quality tapes and recorders, especially if you recorded the same tape several times.

I am only talking about data stored on analog audio cassetes. I expect dedicated tape drives to have better characteristics.