phatdats.com is a member of the etree community. etree is a network of servers located around the world with the purpose to freely distribute live music from bands that allow taping. etree uses a lossless compression scheme know as "shns". files in the shn format offer dramatically increased quality over mp3's, while still being compressed for ease of downloading. you must have high speed access to download from phatdats.etree.org, but there are servers dedicated to dialup users. everything you need to get started in the etree community is free. basically, you need a program to decode shn>wav and a ftp client. links to these, and many other audio programs can be found on etree's green site.
more info can be found on the etree site: