From where does all this good music spring? Through the good offices of the caring, quality-conscious trading community, which goes to great pains to ensure, in a manner likened to eugenics, that the "seeding" of the musical gene pool is as pure and defect-free as possible before the recording is prepared for general circulation.

It starts with the recordists -- the people who actually attend the concerts to record the bands that play the music. To use the old, predigital terminology, most "tapers " nowadays still record to DAT (digital audio tape, which is not a CD-burnable .WAV file until it's transferred to a PC). Some record to MiniDisc, though purists disparage this more accessible method due to its lossy compression scheme. A growing minority is moving toward recording directly onto the hard drive of a laptop PC (storing the file in .WAV format if using a Windows-based device). The show is saved as one big computer file (or, at least, one file per set that the band performs) and then later cut into tracks with CD-editing software and mastered by the recordist or other technically proficient folks and archived to SHN format. Then it is extracted to .WAV and mastered by making sure the seed is arranged into tracks in a way that provides a pleasant listening experience, so it can finally be burned to create an aesthetically pleasing audio-format music CD.

After the technical and aesthetic groundwork is laid, the show is released into general circulation. This is where it all pays off -- digitally perfect copies of concerts await those who are willing to dig a little bit. If you like the Grateful Dead -- a band notable for being a pioneer in actively encouraging concert recording and trading -- check in at Usenet's rec.music.gdead newsgroup to peruse daily trading offers from like-minded souls, especially on the ninth of every month, when more people show up for so-called BnP (blanks and postage) day. (Refer to www.mcnichol.com). Or, take matters into your own hands: Peruse music traders' lists at db.etree.org and phishhook.com , or download SHN files of the Dead and myriad other bands directly from the following sites: gdlive.com , www.archive.org/audio/ , furthurnet.org , BitTorrent wiki.etree.org/index.php?page=BitTorrentDownloads , tunetree ibiblio.org/pub/multimedia/tunetree and shnslingerz music.ibiblio.org/pub/multimedia/shnslingerz. By and large, I've had good experiences with these servers, downloading SHN files via FTP as well as HTML.