I’d be curious to know if anyone has hacked direct analog recording and playback onto any of the generations of LTO drives. That wouldn’t help you with existing cassettes; but it’s a lot more tape area to work with; as well as being not-totally-dead, so hardware built for relatively demanding customers continues to be produced to the present day; but declining enough that you can probably get something on the secondary market rather than calling your IBM rep and dying of sticker shock.
It would, obviously, be trivial to record digital audio on LTO tape; but if you are going to do that you might as well use any one of the vastly more convenient media for the job.
