A little project...

About a month ago, I decided to give a little project a go. For those of you that know me, I am a pretty big Dave Matthews Band fan. I have been to 37 DMB shows over the past 10 years and have made some amazing friends over those years. One of the great things about this community is tapers. These are individuals who attend shows and record them, then share them with everyone so that you can hear how the band sounded on that particular night. These records are always free and must be traded in a lossless format, normally FLAC or SHN. I really don't want to get into the difference of mp3, wav, and lossless formats, but just know that soundwise, lossless is way better.

Before the internet become what it is today, fans in the DMB community used B&P (Burn & Package). Basically once someone had a particular show, you would send them CD's with the appropriate return envelope, they would burn it for you, then return it to you. Then you could return the favor for someone else. Once the internet blew up, the shows were just uploaded to some particular site and you could download then. The way this was done was through a system called Bit Torrent. One of the more popular torrent clients is Utorrent. This is a peer to peer sharing system that has become pretty popular. All of this sound a little over your head? Its ok, I am here to help.

I have teamed up with a few buddies and we have basically done everything for you. All you have to do is download and worry about nothing I have previously talked about. The only thing you really have to do, if you only use iTunes, is convert to WAV. Just download Traders Little Helper, drag the downloaded FLAC files into the program, and decode. Drag into iTunes and you will be listening to shows in no time.

Here is a link to the DMB Spreadsheet that we have created and will continue to update as more shows become available.

https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=0Ag_UrbWRnAujdGZmbWtVU1BJaExCdWhDQjZuazByeEE&hl=en&output=html

Currently there are 589 full band shows and 141 Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds show.

It is great to download shows from years past and listen to how much the band has evolved over time. I will feature shows on occasion that I feel would be great to listen to. I hope that this can provide those who can't torrent, or those who simply don't know how to, and way to enjoys shows from years past. Happy Listening.

Is there a particular show you downloaded that you really liked? Do you have any questions on how to obtain one of these show?