Every show on this site travels the same road from a 25-year-old DAT tape to the player on its show page. This is that road — what happens to the audio at each step, which of it is done by hand and which by machine, and where the files live along the way. The measurements each step produces are published per show in the “Technical data” table.
1 · The tape
Audience and soundboard DAT recordings, 1998–2001, transferred to a single whole-show WAV per tape (16–24-bit, 32–48 kHz — whatever the tape was).
2 · Editing
Working through the whole show in one project: every song gets a label at its
boundaries, a fade-in, and a studio fade-out on the applause; the loudest peaks
get individual clip repairs. The labels are also exported as a tiny plain-text
file (labels.txt) alongside the tape — more on why below.
Optional — noise reduction. When tape hiss warrants it, broadband noise reduction is applied across the entire show before splitting, so every track shares one noise profile. The settings are recorded in a note kept with the exported tracks, and shows treated this way carry a noise-reduced badge on their technical data. The untreated export is archived too, so the un-reduced version of every hand edit survives.
The project is then exported as one FLAC per song.
3 · Diagnosis
Every exported track is measured before anything is processed: integrated loudness, true peak, loudness range, DC offset, a clipping scan, a DAT dropout scan (held or muted samples from tape error concealment), a digital click and discontinuity scan (corrupted or skipped samples — a step in the waveform is a defect when it dwarfs its surroundings, which separates real glitches from claps), an effective-bandwidth check against the file’s sample rate (catches mislabelled rates and lossy-sourced files), and channel health — left/right balance and phase. Any defect is reported with its exact timestamp, and a spectrogram image per track can be generated for visual inspection of suspect tapes. A track that fails goes back to the editing stage — nothing clipped gets published.
4 · Loudness normalization
Each track is brought to the archive standard — −20 LUFS integrated with a −1 dBTP true-peak ceiling — using linear gain: one constant boost for the whole track, no compression, no EQ, so the music’s own dynamics stay intact. On some audience tapes the loudest thing on the recording is a burst of applause rather than the music itself — when that happens, the track’s music still gets a plain linear boost, sized to the music alone, and only the applause is gently capped so it can’t overshoot; if the loudest moment is inside the performance instead, nothing is capped and the track simply lands a little quieter and honest. Either way, dynamics are never squashed to hit the target louder — a track landing a few dB quieter than its neighbors is preferred over flattening a fade or a clap-driven track pumping the room noise.
The output is a FLAC master and a 320 kbps MP3 per track, each with an audio MD5 fingerprint, full embedded metadata (title, artist, show, track number, year) so downloads display properly in any player, and a true-peak check on the MP3 itself (lossy encoding can overshoot peaks).
A provenance record is written per show — source format, the exact filter chain, per-track before/after measurements, and which of the above treatments each track got — and that record is what renders as the show’s “Technical data” table, including a Treatment column you can hover for the exact reasoning.
5 · Distribution
The processed tracks fan out to three places: the streaming/download store, a Drive backup, and precomputed waveform shapes for the player. The files on the store are then re-downloaded and their MD5s checked against the provenance record — zero mismatches required.
6 · The show page
Track list with the waveform player (streaming the MP3s), lossless FLAC downloads, and the full technical data — loudness in and out, true peak, dynamic range, and gain applied for every track.
The raw archive
Everything above describes the listening copies. The raw archive — the recordings exactly as they came off the tape, before any fade, clip repair, or noise treatment — is preserved separately, and deliberately small:
- The whole-show WAV is the raw archive: an untouched, sample-for-sample transfer of the tape, kept on two services.
- The labels file is the split recipe: a few kilobytes of plain text recording where every song starts and ends. Together, WAV + labels can regenerate a folder of raw, unedited per-song files at any time, with a single command — so those files are never stored, only their recipe. A plain-text file will outlive any project format or audio tool.
- When a show gets extra treatment (like noise reduction), the export without that treatment is archived as well — hand edits are the one thing no recipe can regenerate.
The rule behind all of it: store what hands made; derive what machines can remake.
And the archive’s working rule overall: repairs by hand, loudness by machine, and a paper trail for both. Anything artistic — where a song starts, how the applause fades, whether the hiss is worth treating — is a human decision made in Audacity. Everything mechanical is scripted, measured, and recorded, so any track can be traced back to exactly what was done to it.
The step-by-step version of this page — the actual working checklist and the tools behind each stage — is The Manual.