How to Find New Live Recordings Across nugs.net, Archive.org, and Phish.in

Goose plays a Tuesday, and by the time you've had your coffee the next morning you want the tape. Not the setlist. The tape. The actual recording, the one where you can hear whether that second-set jam went where everyone on the lot thread swore it did.

So you start checking. nugs first, because if it was a soundboard night the official board might already be posted. Then Phish.in, if it's Phish. Then Archive.org, where some hero with a DPA rig may have put up an audience source overnight. Then Relisten in another tab. Then you refresh all of them an hour later, because the upload hadn't landed yet.

That's the hunt. Five places, every one a different tab or app, none of them talking to each other. It's the morning-after ritual for anyone who chases live recordings, and it's been the same for fifteen years.

Showboard 1.5 shipped today, and the thing I'm most glad to finally have is the one that ends that ritual. It's called Fresh Tapes.

Where new live recordings actually show up

Before the shortcut, the honest map. If you want to find new live recordings, here's where they land and what each place is good for.

nugs.net is the official source. Soundboards, multitrack mixes, the recordings the bands and their crews put out. When it's a nugs night the quality is the board feed, and it tends to post fast. It's a subscription, and it only ever sees its own catalog.

Phish.in is the audience archive for Phish, and it's about the closest thing the scene has to a library card. Community-run, complete, the AUD sources cataloged by date. Chasing a Phish show that never got an official release? This is usually where it turns up first.

Archive.org, the Live Music Archive, is the mother lode. Decades of audience tapes for hundreds of taper-friendly bands, uploaded by the people who recorded them. Goose, Billy Strings, the Dead, Panic, the whole etree tradition. It's also raw. New uploads land constantly, but you have to go digging, collection by collection.

Relisten is a free browser over Archive.org and Phish.in. Good for poking around. It's the app a lot of people keep open in a second window, which is the exact problem.

Each one is fine on its own. The catch is that "what's new across all of them" doesn't live anywhere. There's no single feed. So you check four places by hand, and you do it again tomorrow.

Fresh Tapes: one feed for what just dropped

Fresh Tapes is a rail on the Showboard home screen that surfaces recently-added live recordings across nugs.net, Archive.org, and Phish.in at the same time. You open the app and the new stuff is right there, lined up newest first, instead of buried across three tabs.

It filters to your artists. If your library leans Phish, Goose, and Billy Strings, that's what Fresh Tapes watches, so you're not scrolling past a hundred bands you don't follow to reach the one show you actually care about.

And every recording wears its source badge before you press play. SBD, AUD, Matrix. You know whether you're about to hear a board feed or an audience source from the back of the lawn, and those are not the same listen. You shouldn't have to guess.

So the morning-after hunt collapses into one screen. Goose played last night, you open Showboard, and if the AUD went up on Archive.org or the board hit nugs, it's sitting in Fresh Tapes waiting. No five-tab refresh loop.

How to actually use it

Point Showboard at your library first, so it knows which artists to watch. Sign into the streaming sources you use, nugs and the rest. After that, Fresh Tapes does the watching. New recordings across those sources show up on the home screen, newest first, filtered to the bands already in your collection. Click one and it plays bit-perfect to your DAC, the same as anything else in the app.

That's it. The whole point is there's nothing to do.

What it does, and what it doesn't

Fresh Tapes covers the sources that have a real "recently added" notion, which right now means nugs.net, Archive.org, and Phish.in. It's a discovery rail, not an alert that buzzes your phone at 2am the second an upload lands. It shows you what's new when you open the app.

It's also not the deep dig. If you want to line up every AUD source of 12/31/95 and compare them, that's a search, not a what's-new feed. Fresh Tapes is for the morning after, when you only need to know whether last night's show made it online yet.

While you're in there, 1.5 brought a couple of other things worth a look. The whole app got a new look. And when one show exists in more than one place, you can now pick which source to play it from on a single screen, instead of hunting around for the best copy. But Fresh Tapes is the one I'd wanted for years.

The short version

You've been checking five places every morning to see if the tape's up. Showboard checks them for you and puts the new ones on one screen, badged, filtered to your bands, ready to play to your DAC.

It's $39.99, once. No subscription. Fourteen days free to try it, no card, and thirty days to get your money back if it's not for you. Mac only, downloaded straight from the site.

If you've been to the shows, you know the wait for the tape. Showboard exists because of that knowing.

Try it at showboard.app.

Try it at showboard.app.