About this app

FIND THE SHOW ON YOUR GRATEFUL DEAD TAPE

The most important capability of this application, I hope, is its ability to identify which show performance your Grateful Dead tape was recorded at. If you have an unlabeled tape, or a long mp3 file of a show, or otherwise need to discover which show the music was played at, this application can probably help to establish the truth. It works like this:

1. You input two songs that were played consecutively at the show.
2. The application displays the complete set lists for shows where the song sequence you submitted were played in the same order at the show.
3. You browse the list of candidate shows to discover which show your tape was made from. When you see a set list with the songs on your tape, in order, you have found the correct show. At that point, you can label your tape with the date, location and set list for the show.

OTHER USES:

You can search shows by date and by location.

LIMITATIONS:

This application works because Jerry Stratton kindly compiled and shared his database of Dead shows (still available at gdead.berkeley.edu). Unfortunately, the database has some modest inconsistency that makes this application less useful. For example, when selecting a song and typing Fire, and waiting a moment, it retrieves two listings for Fire on the mountain. This is because the source database has a case-sensitive difference between two listings. One record says Fire on the Mountain and the other says Fire On the Mountain. This is real problem and will cause some show searches to fail. You will need to search all of the possible combinations to overcome this shortcoming. Finding and correcting these anomalies would be difficult and might introduce other problems. For now, when the song listing choice list shows more than one listing for one song, you will need to check them both.

The third set is usually only one song. For this reason,

You can search for shows by only entering one song. This is likely to return too many shows to be useful. Sometimes even two consecutive songs will reveal a show list that is very long. For example, the sequence of these two songs in this order:

China cat sunflower
I know you rider

...shows 376 shows! That is a very long list. Such sequences are uncommon. Usually two consecutive shows will reveal a few number of shows.

CREDIT: Jerry Stratton and others who compiled and shared dead show data.