Not analogue audio cassettes though.

They would get tangled in the tape deck, and be ruined. They would sightly unspool themselves, get caught on something or twisted, and be ruined. They would stretch with overuse, distorting the audio horribly and/or comically, and be ruined.

In my youth it seemed like every major roadside was littered with discarded audio tape. Clumps of tangled brown film dolefully flapping about in the breeze.

This is not a format to be overly nostalgic for.

I could probably fit my entire MP3 collection as FLAC on a single DLT. Shame abou the seek times but some kind of lower bitrate forward coding across the entire dataset, a cache and seek times might not matter as much for long plays.

It would be very silly to repurpose a DLT tape library for an audio jukebox: one which carried "lethal to enter if not disarmed" stickers and a ruinous electricity bill.

Audio tapes were crap for most people.

There was good tape certainly -- reel to reel, metal tapes, etc. But most people used the cheap normal tape, and probably C120 which had a tendency to get tangled in the mechanism.

Modern dirt cheap 44.1 KHz/16 bit audio is far superior to anything you could get in the tape era, except maybe a reel to reel tape set to the high quality speed.

And even the best tape still had some wow and flutter because it's ultimately a mechanical device with imperfect speed control.

>Printers are crap even today.

If you stay away from the cheap consumer printers that are designed to sell ink cartridges, printers are not so bad. We have a Brother multifunction office inkjet printer that's been great, ink is reasonably priced (cheaper than the laser printer that we replaced with it), and it reliably prints around 5 - 10,000 pages/year as well as scanning almost as many pages. (Wife works in a state regulated industry and they require a lot of paper documentation, every year they promise to release the system that will reduce the need for so much paper, and it's always 6 months away)

Yeah, thankfully we don't need them that often anymore. That said, is there a convenient, compact printer for documents (greyscale is fine) for the just in case times? I think I've seen a compact bar shaped laser printer aimed at laptops, but I'm afraid of the toner cartridges being overpriced or hard to find.