Showboard Is Live Today. Here's the Show That Started It.

Lemonwheel, 1998. Loring Air Force Base, up in Limestone, Maine, about as far north as you can drive and still be in this country. That second-set ambient jam, the one that just drifts. I wasn't taping. Somebody with a real rig was, and the transfer made it around the trading circles, and years later I went looking for it on a random Tuesday night.

It took four apps to hear one set.

nugs for the official soundboard. Phish.in open in a browser tab for the rest of the archive. Archive.org for the audience tape a friend swore sounded better. And a local folder of FLACs somebody mailed me on a drive years back. I had the show. I just had it in four places, and none of them talked to each other, and none of them knew what a set break was.

That's the part that always got me. Every one of those apps is fine. LivePhish is official and clean, Relisten is a gift, and Phish.in is about the closest thing this community has to a library card. But none of them was built by someone who actually goes hunting for 8/17/97 at one in the morning. They treat a live recording like a studio track with a weird filename. Source type? Same gray row whether it's SBD, AUD, or Matrix. Taper notes? Gone. The Tweezer that runs into Tweeprise picks up a half-second gap, because the player doesn't know those two are one thing.

So I built my own. I'm a fan first and a Mac developer second, in that order, and I got tired enough to write code about it.

Showboard puts six sources behind one search bar. Your local library, nugs.net, TIDAL, Qobuz, Archive.org, and Phish.in. Type a date or a song and it pulls every version it can find, across all of them, and lines them up. SBD, AUD, and Matrix get badges, so you know what you're about to hear before you press play. Taper notes show up the way the taper wrote them, in monospaced text. Set I, Set II, Encore. The segues stay gapless. Mark a show you were at and it searches all six sources in the background, builds your Concert Diary, and makes an "I Was There" card you can actually share instead of screenshotting setlist.fm.

It plays bit-perfect, too. CoreAudio exclusive mode straight to your DAC, sample rate matching per track, a real signal-path display so you can watch the chain. DSD files play too, decoded to high-resolution PCM. No native DSD or DoP passthrough. There's a 10-band parametric EQ and headphone crossfeed if you want to shape the sound, and nothing in the way if you don't.

It's Mac only. That's not laziness. Exclusive-mode DAC access lives down in CoreAudio, Apple's sandbox blocks it, and that's the same reason it isn't on the App Store. You download it straight from the site. If you're on a PC, I'm genuinely sorry.

Anyway. It's live today.

$39.99. Once. No subscription, no thirteen a month, no eight-hundred-dollar lifetime tier. Less than four months of a nugs sub. Fourteen days free to try it, no card, and thirty days to get your money back if it isn't for you. Use it on every Mac you own. No device limit.

Here's what it won't do. It won't run your whole house like Roon. It's not a streaming service. If you mostly play studio albums, you really don't need it. This is a player for people whose music ended up scattered across too many apps because the shows mattered enough to chase down.

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

Try it at showboard.app.