So, what exactly is DDS, you say?

DDS stands for Digital DMB Source. Essentially, it is a distribution system that helps to spread high-quality, purely-digital, entirely-legal recordings of the concerts of the Dave Matthews Band or related projects (i.e. - Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds acoustic shows).

DDS started out as the brain child of two people - Mike Vernal and myself. We had both been relatively active in the spread of digitally-sourced shows and had watched and participated with more than a bit of enthusiasm and interest in the rise of "e-trading" of shows. This involved the trading of losslessy-compressed shows via high-speed internet networks. These shows could be uncompressed to exact copies of the originals and then burned to CD. Other groups, notably People for a Clearer Phish (which has since been basically consumed by the massive etree.org movement) were promoting this way of spreading shows quite vehemently.

Both Mike and I found this to be a terrific idea very early on. In fact, even before we had even heard of PCP or etree, we had already been sending entire wave files, uncompressed, over the network. I'm sure that our respective residential networking/computing folks weren't too happy about that :-)

Regardless, Mike and I both realized that this was a golden opportunity. We had lamented for quite some time the proliferation of poorly-sourced CD's and this seemed like the perfect way to combat that. Get a good source on DAT, convert it to CD, and now you could control the quality of all subsequent copies of that show.

Thus, DDS was born.

About a year and a half later, DDS now stands at almost 1000 members on its egroups.com mailing list, and has gone through growing pains, spurts, and declines. It's been a crazy ride, but hopefully a useful one. We'll see where we go next...