Update: due to some problems with my login and my own inertia in correcting them, this site has been dormant for years. Now that I've finally resolved them, I intend to make up for lost time. New sources are being put up on archive almost every day, so I have a lot of work to do! Keep checking the "Recent Additions" page for new high quality audience recordings.
This site was originally created for the benefit of listeners of Sunshine Daydream, a show on WTJU which plays mainly live Grateful Dead and for which I'm one of the DJs. Whenever I played a cut from an AUD tape I'd downloaded from archive.org and thought listeners would want to download, it would take forever to explain "go to archive.org, click on Audio, then Grateful Dead, then 'browse by year'" - by which time everyone would switch over to WNRN. I needed a shorthand way to quickly direct listeners over to quality AUD sources that they could download. The result: gdluckynumbers.org. That was quick, wasn't it? ;-)
I took about a week and a half listening to sample streams from every single Grateful Dead audience recording then hosted at archive.org. Any sources that sounded of sufficient quality to please the average radio listener (those who would be less forgiving of the quality flaws in an AUD than the typical hardcore fan) were listed and categorized as either Pristine (identical in quality to a board or high-quality FM), Good to Excellent (enjoyable to just falling short of Pristine) and Rough Diamonds (not stellar quality, but worth listening to because of the quality or energy of the playing). The result is a list of literally hundreds of great sounding audience sources that you can download legally and for free with the Dead's blessing. I have sifted out the stems and seeds and left you with only the fine, heady bud, the creme de la creme of the currently circulating AUDs. All shows listed are linked to their download pages on archive, and streaming links are posted in the list as well.
New AUDs are being uploaded all the time to the Live Music Archive. As they are, I will periodically add the ones that pass the ear test. You can also look forward to information on where to go for soundboards (the Dead still allow them to be circulated, but you have to work a bit to get them), a brief history of Live Dead in the age of the internet and a bit more color and pizazz (but don't expect too much - this is an informational site!). For now, though,
Statement from the Grateful Dead
The Grateful Dead and our managing organizations have long encouraged the purely non-commercial exchange of music taped at our concerts and those of our individual members. That a new medium of distribution has arisen - digital audio files being traded over the Internet - does not change our policy in this regard. Our stipulations regarding digital distribution are merely extensions of those long-standing principles and they are as follow:
No commercial gain may be sought by websites offering digital files of our music, whether through advertising, exploiting databases compiled from their traffic, or any other means.
All participants in such digital exchange acknowledge and respect the copyrights of the performers, writers and publishers of the music.
This notice should be clearly posted on all sites engaged in this activity.
We reserve the ability to withdraw our sanction of non-commercial digital music should circumstances arise that compromise our ability to protect and steward the integrity of our work.
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This website is created and maintained by Bill Tetzeli.
