A taper is a person who records musical events, often from standing microphones in the audience, for the benefit of the musical group's fanbase. Such taping was popularized in the late 1960s and early 1970s by fans of the

Grateful Dead The Grateful Dead was an American rock music, rock band formed in 1965 in Palo Alto, California. The band is known for its eclectic style, which fused elements of rock, Folk music, folk, country music, country, jazz, bluegrass music, bluegrass, ...

. Audio recording, while not officially allowed until the creation by the band of a "tapers' section" behind the soundboard in the mid-1980s, was generally tolerated at shows and fans would share their tapes through trade. Taping and trading became a Grateful Dead sub-culture. Tapers generally do not financially profit from recording such concerts and record using their own equipment with permission from the artist. Taper recordings are commonly considered legal because the recordings are permitted and distribution is free. Taper etiquette strictly excludes bootlegging for profit. "Stealth taper" is a common term for a person who may furtively bring equipment into shows to record without explicit permission. Although taping is usually done with microphones, often bands will allow plugging into the soundboard for a direct patch. Taping setups are generally portable, operating on high quality

condenser microphones A microphone, colloquially called a mic or mike (), is a transducer that converts sound into an electrical signal. Microphones are used in many applications such as telephones, hearing aids, public address systems for concert halls and public ...

phantom power Phantom power, in the context of professional audio equipment, is DC electric power transmitted through microphone cables to operate microphones that contain active electronic circuitry. It is best known as a convenient power source for con ...

, a microphone

preamplifier A preamplifier, also known as a preamp, is an electronic amplifier that converts a weak electrical signal into an output signal strong enough to be noise-tolerant and strong enough for further processing, or for sending to a power amplifier an ...

and a recording device all of which are battery powered.Paul L. "Pro" Pearson, Ph.D
Setting Levels "The music is what it’s about..."
''jambands.com'' May 1999 A common means of trade is by transferring the tape recording to a

lossless Lossless compression is a class of data compression that allows the original data to be perfectly reconstructed from the compressed data with no loss of information. Lossless compression is possible because most real-world data exhibits statistic ...

digital format such as

FLAC FLAC (; Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference software p ...

and sharing through an internet file share protocol such as BitTorrent with the assistance of a networking service such as

etree etree, or electronic tree, is a music community created in the summer of 1998 for the online trading of live concert recordings. etree pioneered the standards for distributing lossless audio on the net and only permits its users to distribute the ...

References

{{reflist

External links

DAT-heads
– resource for tapers and trading
TaperSection
– forums for tapers
Archive.org
– archive of live music recordings Sound recording

See also

References

External links