Taper (concert)

[1] Audio recording, while not officially allowed until the creation by the band of a "tapers' section" behind the soundboard in the mid-1980s, was generally tolerated at shows and fans would share their tapes through trade.

"Stealth taper" is a common term for a person who may furtively bring equipment into shows to record without explicit permission.

Although taping is usually done with microphones, often bands will allow plugging into the soundboard for a direct patch.

Taping setups are generally portable, operating on high quality condenser microphones, phantom power, a microphone preamplifier and a recording device all of which are battery powered.

[3] A common means of trade is by transferring the tape recording to a lossless digital format such as FLAC and sharing through an internet file share protocol such as BitTorrent with the assistance of a networking service such as etree.