The Problem
You've got SBDs on an external drive from twenty years of trading. A nugs subscription for the official releases. TIDAL for studio albums and the occasional live drop. Archive.org for the audience tapes nobody else bothered to upload. That's four apps, four search bars, four play buttons. For one band.
You know exactly which version of a show you want, and you know exactly where it lives. The problem is getting there. Open one app, search, go back, open another app, search again. By the time you've found the recording you wanted, the mood is gone. Showboard puts all six sources in one window, so the only thing between you and the music is pressing play.
Local Files
FLAC, DSD, ALAC, WAV, AIFF, and more. Point Showboard at any folder on your Mac or a mounted network share, and it scans everything. Metadata imports automatically. Live recordings are detected and organized by date, venue, and artist without you lifting a finger.
That folder of 2019 Goose SBDs you got from a friend? The meticulously tagged Grateful Dead collection on your NAS? They show up right alongside your streaming sources, same interface, same search, same library. Your files, your quality, zero compromise.
nugs.net
Hi-res live concert streaming, right inside Showboard. Your nugs subscription works exactly as you'd expect: browse artists, recent shows, and on-this-day shows. The difference is you never leave the app.
Pull up Billy Strings at the Capitol Theatre, 2024-01-20. Or that Umphrey's McGee run at the Riviera you keep going back to. nugs.net has the official recordings, and Showboard puts them one search away from everything else in your collection.
TIDAL
Lossless and Hi-Res streaming from the full TIDAL catalog. Studio albums, live albums, everything. When you want to hear the studio version of a song you just heard live, it's right there in the same library.
TIDAL's catalog fills in the gaps your live collection doesn't cover. Studio records, deep cuts, side projects. All of it plays through the same audio engine, same bit-perfect output, same DAC settings. No context switching.
Qobuz
Studio-quality lossless. Great for studio albums, hi-res releases, and the kind of audiophile-grade masters that reward a proper DAC. Qobuz integrates the same way as every other source: connect once, search everything.
If you're the type who owns the 24/192 version of an album because you can hear the difference, Qobuz in Showboard means those files play with the same exclusive-mode, bit-perfect treatment your local files get.
Archive.org
Free access to the Live Music Archive. Thousands of audience recordings, soundboards, and matrices from taper-friendly bands. No login required. No subscription. Just music.
That Grateful Dead show from Cornell, 1977-05-08? It's there. The Widespread Panic run at the Georgia Theatre from '97? It's there. The random Moe. audience tape from a Tuesday in Buffalo? Also there. Archive.org is the deepest well for live music, and Showboard makes it searchable alongside everything else you own.
Phish.in
The complete Phish live archive. Every show, every source, free and open. No login needed. If Phish played it, Phish.in has it, and Showboard brings it into your library.
Looking for that 1997-12-31 "Runaway Jim" from Madison Square Garden? Or the legendary "Tweezer" from 2015-08-22 at Magnaball? Search by date, venue, or song name. Every version, every night, all in one place.
Unified Search
Type a band name, a date, a venue. Results come back from all connected sources in one list. No tabs to switch, no apps to open, no remembering where you put things.
Search "Red Rocks 2023" and get Billy Strings from nugs, Dead & Co from your local files, and audience tapes from Archive. All in the same results list, all one click from playing.
The search bar is the front door to your entire collection. It doesn't care where the music lives. It just finds it.
Your Files Play First
If you have a local copy of a recording, Showboard plays it automatically. Better quality, zero buffering, no stream. Your files always take priority.
You spent years building that collection. The hand-tagged SBDs, the carefully organized folders, the lossless transfers. Showboard respects that work. When a local file matches what you're looking for, it plays from disk. Faster, more reliable, and exactly the quality you chose. Streaming sources fill in the rest.