This site is an ongoing labor of love — digitizing, cleaning up, and sharing the live recordings of Jerry Hannan, the Mad Hannans, and Sean Hannan. Here’s how it has come together so far.
Week one — getting it online (June 9–13, 2026)
The archive went live as a simple homepage and quickly grew a proper foundation.
- Put up the first “About This Archive” page explaining what these recordings are and why I’m sharing them.
- Password-protected the lossless WAV masters so the big files stay controlled, while keeping the music easy to listen to.
- Set up automatic publishing — every change now deploys itself to the web.
- Rebuilt the site around a data-driven generator, giving each show its own page with a proper track list.
- Posted the first track-listed shows: Jerry Hannan at 19 Broadway (Jan 8, 2001), the Mad Hannans at Sweetwater (Feb 17, 2000), and Sean Hannan at 19 Broadway (Jan 24, 2000) — followed by a redesign of the archive and per-song sharing links.
Week two — more shows, more polish (June 14–20, 2026)
The site split into proper sections — Home, Archive, Shows, Updates, and Contact — and an Updates feed began tracking changes as they happen. New shows kept arriving:
- Sean Hannan at 19 Broadway (Feb 21, 2000)
- Jerry Hannan at 19 Broadway (Jan 15, 2001) — later volume-normalized across all 31 tracks
- The Mad Hannans at Sweetwater (Oct 17, 2000) — the Birthday Show, with a full lossless download
- Jerry Hannan at 19 Broadway (June 21, 1999)
I also added notes about audio levels and the purpose of the archive, and began marking which recordings came straight off the soundboard (SBD) versus from the audience (AUD).
Week three — listening, searching, restoring (June 21–26, 2026)
The biggest leap in how the archive feels to use:
- Every full show now streams as a clean 320 kbps MP3, with free MP3 downloads on the show pages.
- Added the Sean Hannan 19 Broadway (unknown date) set and the Mad Hannans at Cafe Java (Sept 9, 1999).
- Introduced waveform players so you can see each song as you listen.
- Added an Archive sort toggle (browse by date or by artist) and a search engine to find any song or show by title, artist, venue, date, or tag — backed by an ongoing effort to tag covers and songwriters.
- Posted the Mad Hannans at Sweetwater (Jan 6, 2001) — a rough, muffled audience tape that I then went back and cleaned up with EQ and loudness normalization to make it easier on the ears.
- Gave the Sean Hannan (Feb 21, 2000) set the same loudness treatment, and corrected a long-mislabeled song: “Irish Song” is really “Ode to Biddy McGee.”
Week four — a real audio pipeline (June 27–28, 2026)
The cleanup work grew up into a proper, repeatable process. Instead of treating each show by hand, there’s now an automated audio-engineering workflow that takes the original lossless masters and brings every track to one consistent, comfortable listening level across the whole archive — solo sets and full-band shows alike — all with a ceiling that prevents digital clipping.
- Each processed show now carries a “Technical data” panel — the before-and-after loudness, true peak, and dynamic range for every song, plus exactly which version of the workflow touched each track.
- Every show page shows its processing status at a glance — whether it’s been through the new workflow yet, or is still on the list.
- Re-mastered to the new standard: Jerry Hannan at 19 Broadway — June 21, 1999; Jan 8, 2001 (now with lossless FLAC downloads added); and Jan 15, 2001 (redone from the masters to the new loudness standard).
- Settled on one loudness standard for the entire archive — after A/B testing confirmed the full-band shows gained nothing audible from being louder, the Mad Hannans sets now sit at the same comfortable level as everything else. The earlier −16 passes are being redone to match. First through the new process: the Mad Hannans at Sweetwater (Feb 17, 2000), the Oct 17, 2000 Birthday Show, the Cafe Java set (Sept 9, 1999), and Sean Hannan’s Feb 21, 2000 set.
- Added corrective EQ to the workflow for salvaging poor source tapes, and used it to rebuild the muddy Mad Hannans at Sweetwater (Jan 6, 2001) straight from the raw transfer — cutting the low-mid mud and lifting presence and air to bring the vocals forward, then normalizing to the −20 standard. The exact EQ is recorded with each track.
- Behind the scenes: faster page loads, better link previews when a show is shared, and more reliable, properly protected lossless downloads.
Week five — repairing the damaged peaks (June 29–30, 2026)
Some older recordings have a flaw that volume adjustment alone can’t fix: bursts of applause so loud they overloaded the original tape and distorted. This week the focus turned to repairing that damage by hand before normalizing.
- Went back to one of the very first shows posted — Sean Hannan at 19 Broadway (Jan 24, 2000), a 31-song solo set — and found nine tracks where loud audience clapping had clipped into distortion. Each one was hand-edited in Audacity to smooth out the overloaded peaks, then the whole show was brought to the archive’s −20 loudness standard.
- Brought the undated Sean Hannan at 19 Broadway set (18 songs, with guest turns from Jerry Hannan and Kelly Peterson) through the same workflow — replacing an earlier −16 pass with a clean −20 normalization from the source.
- Kept the whole archive in sync: the original masters, the hand-edited versions, and the final normalized tracks are now all preserved together in the cloud backup.
Week six — New George’s, more shows, and a technical clean-up (July 5–7, 2026)
Added the Mad Hannans at New George’s in San Rafael (Oct 13, 1999) as 14 individual tracks. The show survives as two audience DAT transfers, so I A/B’d them side by side and went with the one that sounded best. Each song was split out, the applause gently faded at the end for easier back-to-back listening, and the whole set brought to the archive’s −20 loudness standard. The set opens with a short soundcheck.
Also launched a new “Songs” section — a cross-referenced matrix of every song against every show. Because the same songs turn up again and again across Jerry, the Mad Hannans, and Sean, you can now pick a song and see every time it was played, each with a player and a link straight to that performance. Browse it as a filterable list or a songs-by-shows grid, sort by how often a song was played, filter by artist, and search for any song by name.
Added two more early Jerry solo shows at 19 Broadway in Fairfax — May 10, 1999 (21 songs) and July 19, 1999 (a long, 26-song set). Each was split into individual tracks by hand in Audacity, with the applause studio-faded at the end of every song and a little clipping cleaned up on the loudest peaks, then run through the pipeline to the archive’s −20 loudness standard. All 47 new tracks flow straight into the Songs matrix, which now also treats Jerry’s “My Dear” and “Ride On” as the same song.
Then a stretch of polish rather than new tapes. The Songs page got a real workover: the list is tighter and easier to scan, with each artist shown as a small colour-coded dot lined up in fixed columns — so you can run your eye down and see at a glance which songs Jerry, the Mad Hannans, or Sean played. The songs-by-shows grid now scrolls sideways properly, and its artist filter finally hides the other artists’ columns instead of just their rows. Two songs on the Sweetwater soundboard (Feb 17, 2000) were corrected as well: a track listed as “There She Was” is really “Butter,” and the copy here was missing its opening chords, so it was swapped for the complete take; and a stray “Da Da Da” was reunited with its full name, the medley “The Kiss – Da Da Da.” Each fix was pushed everywhere the audio lives at once — the streaming store, the cloud archive, and the working files.
Under the hood, the site grew up a little. Every page now carries structured data so search engines read these as live music recordings, performances, and songs rather than anonymous pages. There’s a proper dark mode that follows your device’s setting, an RSS feed of these updates so you can follow new additions, and a round of accessibility work — visible keyboard focus, a skip-to-content link, reduced-motion support, and stronger text contrast. Plumbing you never see, but the kind that keeps an archive healthy.
The work continues — more shows, better audio, and small fixes are always in progress.