Archive Live Dead

I’ve always wanted to listen to more live Grateful Dead, but finding a good show that I hadn’t already heard was a hurdle that meant I often just didn’t. I wanted something that would let me quickly play a Dead show without having to think about which one. On top of that, Drums and Space never really worked for me outside of the live venue, so I wanted to be able to skip them without extra effort.

Fortunately, the Internet Archive has a huge collection of great live shows available to stream as part of their etree collection. So I worked with Claude Code to build a service that does exactly what I wanted. The result is Archive Live Dead.

What It Does

Archive Live Dead helps you find and stream Grateful Dead concerts from the Internet Archive. You sign in, hit play, and it picks a show for you. Concert selection is done by algorithm. It favors shows you haven’t heard, ordered by your preferences and then biased toward shows from around the current time of year. The goal is to get you to a show you’ll like that you haven’t heard.

You never have to browse or search. Just press play.

The Player

The player controls are:

REW : rewinds to the beginning of the current song;
PLAY / PAUSE: starts or pauses playback;
FWD: skips to the next song in the current concert; and,
NEXT CONCERT: jumps to a new concert, selected based on your listening history and preferences.

There’s also a progress bar you can drag to seek within a track, and an upcoming tracks list showing what’s coming next in the current concert.

Preferences

There are three buttons for the currently playing song:

LIKE: marks the song as a favorite. The system will prefer concerts with songs you like.
DISLIKE: marks the song as one you don’t enjoy. The system will de-prioritize concerts heavy with songs you dislike.
MUTE: marks a song as “never play.” The song will be automatically skipped during playback.

These can be set in the player or on the preferences page and can also be set there for years. Preferences save automatically and immediately affect what concert is chosen next.

History

The history page shows what you’ve listened to over time. You can delete your listening history on the preferences page.

Feedback

Archive Live Dead is a work in progress. If you have feedback, suggestions, or run into issues, send an email to attnfeed@gmail.com.

Finally

Archive Live Dead is not made by the the Internet Archive or affiliated with them though I’d be happy to give it over to them if they want it.

* Some of this text was written with the help of Claude Code