Browse by the person who rolled tape
You are on a show. You see who recorded it. One tap, and you are looking at that person's whole body of work: every recording they are credited on, across your local files and Archive.org, laid out in the order the shows happened. Not a search results page you have to rebuild every time. A page for the recordist, the way there is a page for the band.
No other player on the Mac does this. Roon and Audirvana file a live recording as Various Artists and lose the person entirely. Archive.org gives you a raw text query and no profile. Relisten lets you pick a source inside one show but cannot walk a taper across a catalog. Showboard already pulls your local files and the Archive into one library, so one person's work stops being scattered across a folder tree and a browser tab.
The taper section, inside the player
There has always been a taper section. A patch of the floor behind the board where the rigs went up, a trading circle that moved reels then discs then FLAC, a set of conventions the community wrote itself. The people in it are why a night from thirty years ago still sounds like you were standing in the room.
Showboard puts that tradition on screen. The rigs you came to trust, the initials you scanned folder names for, the difference a careful transfer makes. All of it credited and browsable, a tap from the play button.
A recordist's whole body of work
A taper page is a discography. Every recording they are credited on, in chronological order, each badged SBD, AUD, or Matrix, each one playing bit-perfect straight to your DAC. A Source Mix breakdown shows what they were known for. Top Rated ranks their best work across the whole catalog by the community's ratings and listens, not the oldest fifty shows that happened to load first.
Sort by date, by rating, by plays. Scope it to a year or an artist and the page reshapes around it. This is the recordist's catalog the way a collector holds it in their head, finally on a screen instead of in a folder tree and a browser tab.
Built from the tapes you actually play
The section is personal, not a global leaderboard of the same few big names. Tapers You'll Love is ranked from the recordings you actually play. Nights You Were There reaches into your Concert Diary and finds the people who taped the shows you attended, so the tape from a night you stood at is one tap away. Starter Packs group suggested people by band when you are new to a scene.
Follow anyone and their new work lands in a Following lane. Hide the ones you are not interested in and they stop resurfacing. It gets quieter and more yours the more you use it.
What is circulating now, dated honestly
Recent Taper Submissions shows what is freshly going up, dated by when the show happened, not by when a decades-old reel got digitized this week. A 1977 board that just surfaced is a find, but it is not news from last night, and Showboard does not dress it up as news. Recency you can trust is the whole point of a feed.
Credited as written. Never invented.
The people who make these recordings do it for the scene, and the least a player can do is get their name right. Lineage and taper notes are shown exactly as they were written, in monospaced text, the way they were meant to be read. Where a credit reads as more than one name, it stays as written and may include co-credits. Showboard never merges two spellings into a guess.
Source: Schoeps CMC6/MK4 (DFC, ORTF) > Sound Devices MixPre-6 II (24/96) > SD > transfer > FLAC
And when a recording carries no credited person, that is what it says. Showboard degrades, it never fabricates. No invented recordist, no phantom name to fill a page. The trust this section runs on is the same trust the taper community runs on.
Common questions
Where does the taper information come from?
From the etree taper and trader community on Archive.org, plus the taper notes already sitting in your own files. Those are the places a recording actually carries a credited person. Official soundboard releases and studio streaming services do not name a recordist, so Showboard does not pretend they do.
Can I follow a taper?
Yes. Follow anyone and their new recordings collect in a Following lane. Showboard also suggests people worth following two ways: Tapers You'll Love, ranked from the recordings you actually play, and Starter Packs grouped by band for when you are new to a scene. Hide anyone you are not interested in and they stop coming back.
Does it show a taper's best recordings, or just the newest?
Their best. A taper page ranks Top Rated across their entire catalog using the community's ratings and listen counts, not the handful of shows that happened to load first. It also shows a Source Mix breakdown and a full sortable list by date, so you can move through a body of work the way a collector actually thinks about one.
What happens when a recording has no known taper?
Nothing gets invented. Showboard degrades, it never fabricates. If a recording does not carry a credited person, it is not filed under a made-up name to make a page look full. Lineage and taper notes are shown exactly as they were written, and where a credit reads as several names, it is presented as written and may include co-credits.
Is this only for Grateful Dead and Phish?
No. It works for any artist the taper community records and uploads, from the Dead and Phish to Goose, Billy Strings, Widespread, Umphrey's, and the deep jam and roots acts that live on the Archive. If your files carry taper notes, those people show up too.