taken from "The Linux System Administrator's Guide: Version 0.7"

Chapter 6. Using Disks and Other Storage Media

"A tape drive uses a tape, similar [1] to cassettes used for music. A tape is serial in nature, which means that in order to get to any given part of it, you first have to go through all the parts in between. A disk can be accessed randomly, i.e., you can jump directly to any place on the disk. The serial access of tapes makes them slow.

On the other hand, tapes are relatively cheap to make, since they do not need to be fast. They can also easily be made quite long, and can therefore contain a large amount of data. This makes tapes very suitable for things like archiving and backups, which do not require large speeds, but benefit from low costs and large storage capacities."

how can i setup a tape recorder ? could it be used for recording music through kmix or gmix? thanks

photons teleport
check this out :


here

does this apply to every single tape drive or it's just for apecial kinds of tape drives ? Iknow that the answer is quite obvious but i just wanted to make sure my tape recorder don't fit in such category , like D.A.T. (which i think might work ).

These tape drives they are talking about are special ones used to record data tapes. They aren't the same as a normal tape drive which can record audio tapes. If you want to get that running you will first have to buy yourself some hardware.
If you want to be recording music to normal tapes. Then you will have to hook up your tape player to the line out of your soundcard. Depending on your equipment that could cause in a great quality loss though.

thanks a lot man , i`ll try it anyway