#152123  by humsinghum
 
Hey now!
First post here - and I have a few questions about amassing my personal Dead collection.

I'm a little cheesed at dead.net for their limited edition policy on CD releases - it's almost like getting tickets to a show...if you don't have a spare $150 on you RIGHT NOW then you aren't going to get the new whiz bang box set - you'll be forced to get it off ebay for 4 times the price, etc. Scalping all over again. I make a good living but I have two daughters in college and completely missed out on the May 77 box which I wanted, now it's $500 on ebay.

So in addition to a few suitcases of tapes from the old days, I have tons of CD naturally. But in just the past few years of course there has been the digital tsunami of free GD shows on so many different outlets, many of which offer downloading.

I'm thinking of getting a big external hard drive, maybe a 5 terabyte, and starting to amass downloads for my own sanity (if I don't own it then IT MIGHT DISAPPEAR!!) but don't know anything about this really. Is there some way to get schooled on the best way to start down this road? I'd like to be able to have the music and then burn CD's if I want to for my own use, all completely non commercial of course.

Also, many shows are streaming only naturally - is there some way to play the music on my laptop through a home stereo and record it? Maybe onto cassette? Maybe onto a hard drive directly?

Like I said, babe in the woods with this. I've had iTunes and an ipod but that's the limit of my modern musical recording skills.

Many thanks for any help.
 #152124  by playingdead
 
Cassettes? CDs? Do they still make those :lol:

Streaming music is compressed ... so even if you set up, say, Logic Pro on a Mac to record two channels of streaming soundboard from archive.org and took the trouble to break it into tracks again you would just be making a digital copy of a compromised playback. Not really worth the trouble.

I would suggest posting in some forums that are more populated with serious tapers and seeing if someone who has a Charlie Miller style archive of their own might do you a solid by allowing you to send them a nice big hard drive that they can fill up for you. Joining etree.org is not a bad place to start because as part of that community you can seed and partake of everything lossless.

Back in the day, this was how tape collections got started, you found a kind head with some crisp soundboards and gave him boxes of fresh Maxells or TDKs to spin for you at his leisure. And you usually gave him something kind in return :D

I suspect by posting in the right places you will score links to the lossless stashes of soundboard recordings that are out there floating around. Just remember, it's for sharing, not selling.