Live · DAT-sourced · primarily 1998–2003

The Hannan Tapes

Live recordings of Jerry Hannan, Sean Hannan, and the Mad Hannans, taped from the audience and soundboard at clubs across Marin County. Every show is digitized, split into songs, and streamable — hiss and all.

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30 SHOWS · 137 SONGS · 679 TRACKS

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Why I’m Doing This

The real catalyst was wanting to hand these recordings over to Jerry and Nicole. Passing on the DAT tapes meant more than copying a few files — the tapes had to be digitized to disc and kept in a form that could actually be handed on. It quickly became clear that dropping everything onto a memory stick wouldn’t do anyone any favors, so I set out to identify the songs, catalog them, and make the whole thing easier to take in.

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A website was always in the back of my mind, but never something I had the time or bandwidth for — until AI tools like Claude made it surprisingly easy. Once I started building, it became clear I could use the whole project as an excuse to learn: how to work with AI, how to grow a site like this, and how to lean on Audacity to clean up the old recordings.

There are four reasons I keep working on this archive:

To give these tapes a home. I want these old recordings to have a place where the people who were around in those days can stream them, enjoy them again, and relive those moments — back when Jerry and Sean were playing the local bars and venues.
To learn audio restoration. Working through these shows is teaching me how to improve recordings in Audacity — experimenting with normalization, limiters, filters, and the other tools it provides to get the best possible sound from aging tape.
To learn to work with AI. Building and maintaining this site is also how I’m getting familiar with AI — learning to use a tool like Claude and figuring out how to make the most of it.
To make up for the live album that never happened. The Mad Hannans never put out a live record, and I always wished they had. This archive — and especially the playlist generator — is the next best thing: pick a show, or build your own set across all of them, and listen to it as one. It also means I can finally put together the all-Traditional playlist of Irish songs I always hoped Jerry or Sean would release as a record of their own.

About This Archive

These recordings were captured on a Sony portable DAT recorder at clubs in Marin and the Bay Area in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Audio quality varies — the tapes have aged, the microphone was small, and some shows had significant background noise.

This is very much a work in progress. I’m steadily working through the show tapes — splitting them into individual songs and, where it helps the listening experience, cleaning up the MP3 versions: normalizing the volume, adding gentle fades, and removing clicks where possible.

All of this is done on my kid’s $250 Chromebook — there’s no iZotope or other high-end studio software involved. Every edit is done in Audacity or via ffmpeg, run through Claude.

The lossless files are kept close to the original transfer: the full-show WAV downloads and the individual-song FLAC downloads are only minimally processed, for anyone who wants the rawest version. All lossless downloads are password protected.

Most full-show recordings are large lossless WAV files (1–3 GB) and may take a moment to begin playing.