Ryan Dillman

The Etree community was formed in the summer of 1998 for the online trading of live concert CD-R’s. These CDs are traded in a high-quality, lossless digital format which can be burned to CD or listened to on certain media players. While the site was originally formed by Phish fans, it has grown to include concert recordings from hundreds of popular bands such as The Grateful Dead, 311, John Mayer, Ben Folds, Blues Traveler, Dave Matthews Band, Primus, Queens of the Stone Age, and The Smashing Pumpkins (just to name a few).

There are a few things that make Etree different than other file trading sites. First, Etree is a legal site, as only concert recordings from trade-friendly artists are shared. These artists have given the green light to fans to record their shows and share them for free (charging for these recordings, however, would be illegal). Second, Etree is not an mp3 site. The community at Etree feels that mp3s don’t do justice to the original music they’re recorded from, as they’re a highly compressed, low-quality file format. Instead, users on the site use lossless formats such as Shorten and FLAC.

There is a bit of a learning curve to using a site like Etree, but the benefits are great. You can enjoy free concert recordings from hundreds of bands in a format vastly superior to mp3. And although the community is against it, I suppose you could convert the higher-quality files traded here to mp3 format in order to take them with you and listen to them on your portable devices.