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What amazes me is the tape lasted almost 30 years

Yesterday I loaded a program on tape bought at Radio Shack in 1985 into my TRS-80.

That's 41 years ago.

I suspect the key is using commercial-grade recorders and thick tape.

I suspect the key was you used Dr Emmett Brown to tune up the equipment then plugged your electric guitar into his amplifier.

A tape with eight tracks, yes. But not the audio cartridge format commonly known as "8-track"; that wouldn't have been suitable to the task. Here's a photo:

https://science.nasa.gov/image-detail/voyager-digital-record...

An old 1970's arcade game, Quiz Show, used an 8-track tape to store the questions and answers. There's a YouTube video about it, and audio dumps of the 8-track on archive.org I think.