Tangerine Tree - History

History

For almost four decades, much of this material had been traded on an informal basis and many were sold as bootlegs. Much was unidentified, misidentified, low quality and/or a multiple generation copy. Tapes were starting to degrade, as many were as much as forty years old. In the late 1990s, several collectors created the Digital Tape Tree project and distributed the material on CD-R. Collector Heiko Heerssen received permission from Tangerine Dream as long as there was no commercial gains from the project and on 9 January 2002 began to make appeals on the Tangerine Dream discussion group to gather all of the material together and create a formal project that would use the best available sources to provide the definitive version of each recording. A large number of previously unknown recordings were discovered and included in the project. All of the Digital Tape Tree volumes were replaced by later Tangerine Tree or Tangerine Leaves volumes.

In September 2002, before Tangerine Tree set three was released, an interim Classic Tree was established for distributing copies of non-remastered already-circulating bootlegs. All of the concerts used in the Classic Tree were subsequently released as Tangerine Tree volumes in superior quality, rendering the Classic Tree volumes and the bootlegs they represented obsolete.

When new sets were released, standard audio versions on CD-R were traded by signing up on the project home page on a "blanks and stamps" basis where the only actual trade was of blank CDs and shipping. To reduce the number of CDs involved in the trade, the audio tracks were compressed using the shorten lossless compression format.

The Tangerine Tree project was discontinued on 17 October 2006 by Heiko Heerssen due to legal concerns and personal reasons. Releases now can be easily found on the Internet and most reputable trading sites will post those that have not been converted to official releases.