If you have high speed internet (or lots of time), it is really easy to download excellent quality live audio (bootlegs) completely legally. Many people don't want to learn, but listen to me when I tell you there is gold at the end of this rainbow. Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach him to fish...

If you're not interested in doing this bittorrent thing, you can still get high-quality audio on the internet... just go to www.archive.org/details/etree, they have a wealth of stuff in their Live Music Archive and elsewhere... then just get a flac converter (link below in "Flac") to convert the high-quality flac files.

What Is Bittorrent?

Bittorrent is very easy once you get used to it. To help you understand it, picture the internet as a big highway. When you want to download something, you are not actually getting any info or files from this highway, you are just using it to go to other people's (or company's) computers to get the information or file from them. Even if it is a simple web page with only three lines of code, that code has to be physically stored somewhere, you're just using the internet to get to it. This obviously doesn't work well with large files, since the other person's computer must "host" the files and give them out to every person who comes asking, clogging his bandwidth. It'd be like the whole town coming over to your house and causing a bottleneck on your street. Bittorrent solves this. It allows cars to keep moving down the road while passing bits and pieces of the file between each other. The original person with the files gives them to the first few people, and then those people give them to others and a chain starts. The most important thing about bittorrent is this sharing element: after you have downloaded the file, you leave it open in your computer so others can get the file from you. This is completely safe, there's no way a hacker can use this to get in your computer, don't worry about that at all. It's called "sharing", it's how bittorrent works, and as long as your content isn't illegal you don't have to worry.
The actual .torrent file that you will download or open to begin is actually very small, but basically works as a road map, telling your computer where to go to get all the pieces of the file you want. This also greatly helps download speed, since instead of a connection to one computer to download the file, you are connecting simultaneously to many computers and getting the pieces at the same time. The web site, or "tracker" that you will go to to download the .torrent file is basically acting as a hub, you are not downloading the file directly from this site, it is just giving you a roadmap of users with the files. While you are downloading you are a "leecher", but once you are done downloading 100% of your file(s) and start uploading them to other people, you become a "seeder".
There are several different clients, or applications (programs) that run BitTorrent. Don't get confused, BitTorrent is both the name of the original client (program) and the name of the whole internet interface we are talking about. A big list of clients can be found here: http://www.slyck.com/bt.php?page=2., or you can always just google "bittorrent" or "bittorrent clients" . If you are having problems at a tracker (site), one of the first things to do is look on the tracker's home page or FAQ to see a list of what clients they allow. It starts to get complex, even over my head, when talk starts about what the different clients do exactly, such as "announcing" and other technical stuff you don't have to worry about. A tracker site will usually make it clear somewhere as to what clients they allow and recommend. I used the original BitTorrent client at first, but DimeADozen (my preferred bootleg tracker) for some reason recently banned it, it was announcing itself too much or something like that. Again, don't worry, just read the info - according to Dime, uTorrent is recommended, but for some reason some torrents can only be used with uTorrent 1.2.0 and earlier, while some others need 1.2.0 or older. The solution? Go to a site like Filehippo that archives previous versions of releases for different applications, and just use uTorrent 1.2.0. It hasn't given me any problems at any tracker site, I myself recommend it for PC.

Getting Started:

After you've chosen a client just install (and think up a username you'll want to use, you'll want to stick with one when you register at torrent sites [trackers] to make it easy). Browse around the torrent trackers (links below) and find something you like. When you find a torrent you want to jump on, just go to its page and find the .torrent file, and if necessary choose to open it with your chosen bittorrent client. The small .torrent file will open in your client and that's it. Just let it go and your client will automatically use the .torrent file like a map and find all the pieces of the file(s) you're after and put them together for you. One of the most important things to remember (especially at good legitimate torrent sites) is after you have finished downloading, to both keep the torrent file running in your client and to leave the original file(s) untouched where they downloaded to so that you can share them and keep a good ratio.

Share "Ratio"

Your ratio is how much of the file(s) you have uploaded (to other people) divided by how much you downloaded. Ideally you want to upload to others as much as you've downloaded, i.e. your share ratio being 1.0. A bunch of people with low ratios means the torrent just dies, bittorrent needs a sharing community to survive. If you delete the torrent from your computer and you've only uploaded to other people half of what you downloaded, your share ratio will be 0.5, and conversely leaving the torrent in your computer for longer,sharing what you downloaded with two full uploads to people would give you a (phenominal) share ratio of 2.0. Most good live music sites will block you if you don't have a ratio of .25, but you really have to be stingy to do that. Some sites like Dime will check your ratio at every 5 GB that you download, so if you get a new membership somewhere and download a (bunch of) huge file(s), especially DVDs, you usually do not upload as fast as you download and you will have to wait for others to grab the file from you before your ratio improves. You will sometimes see people who have gotten in on the tail end of a torrent not able to finish their downloads, asking if there is a "seeder" around. This is also a good point about keeping a good ratio - get in on popular torrents at the beginning. You can also check through the different tracker sites' FAQs for more info on ratios, and if you're just starting out it's a good idea to read through all the FAQs first anyways.

Why Is My File "Busy"?

In some clients, if you want to use (listen to, burn to CD, or copy to your desktop) what you've just downloaded, you may have to pause the torrent in your client, or quit the client, so the files won't be "busy" in your computer. Don't worry, as long as you keep the original files where they were downloaded to, and don't delete the torrent in your client, you can always reopen the client and start sharing (uploading to others, to increase your ratio) again.

Downloading Live Music

The following info is about getting lossless live music with bittorrent, but keep in mind that bittorrent is just a tool, a new internet interface, you can download any conceivable thing, including some things which are not entirely legal like pirated software. Keep in mind that these live music torrent sites (trackers) have live non-copyrighted material, and to stay legal they will ban anything immediately upon the artist's request or upon knowledge of its previous commercial release, even if one song from a concert was released as a B-side on a single, that song would have to be removed from the rest of the show (at the more reputable trackers anyway). Artists are beginning to realize that letting fans share live music in this way is better than seeing their work sold for someone else's profit.

Flac

The concerts you download will usually be in a lossless format called flac. If a song file on a regular CD is 50 MB (regular audio CD format is called WAV on PC, AIFF in Mac), an mp3 of it would be about 5MB, and the flac would be about 25MB, about half the original but with virtually no loss in sound quality, unlike mp3. Shn (Shorten) was favored a few years ago and is virtually the exact same thing as flac, only flac is preferred these days. Regardless, you don't have to worry because if you have a PC, the best free tool, called Trader's Little Helper, converts both of them into wav files, you can get it here: http://thor.prohosting.com/roh0205/ and if you have Mac there's MacFlac here: http://mac.softpedia.com/get/Audio/MacFLAC.shtml. Just think of FLAC as a zipped wav that just needs to be unzipped before playing or burning.
After you have converted your flacs into wavs (or aiff), just burn them onto a CD. Be sure you don't import the music into iTunes or whatever as mp3s to burn to CD. Convert the flac (or shn) into wav (/aiff) and burn directly. You will find that people will take what they download and actually run it through a program to get a spectral frequency analysis (a visual readout of the frequencies) to ensure that it is lossless, i.e. not mp3-sourced. A lossless file will have a nice even array of peaks throughout the whole range, from the lowest sounds to the highest. If it is sourced from an mp3, you will often find a drastic cut off at both the beginning and end, as these frequencies are usually clipped to help compress the file. When you convert the flacs into wavs (or aiffs) with Trader's Little Helper, you can check a box which will scan the file after it has converted to determine the probability of it being lossless or mp3-sourced. If you ever burn an audio CD from an mp3 source, label it appropriately and let whoever you give a copy to know as well. There is no worse shame for a trader than trying to share a concert with bittorrent, only to have the torrent banned by the tracker because it is found to be "lossy". Welcome to the world of the audiophile. There may be minor annoyances but I assure you the audio treasures you will find will more than make up for them.

Links

After you download your client, these are some of the sites you'll want to visit:

Start here (and register): http://zombtracker.the-zomb.com/login.php

The best is DimeADozen. They cap their membership at 100,000 but are always booting people who can't seem to maintain a .25 share ratio, it took me a couple days of trying to get an account, but this is the goldmine: http://www.dimeadozen.org/index.php

These are also good:
http://www.purelivegigs.com/forums/
http://www.bootcity.org/

To explore other torrent sites (trackers) go to this link: http://netforbeginners.about.com/od/peersharing/a/torrent_search.htm

If you're still confused or just want more info, try these links in addition to some googling of your own:
http://qntm.org/bittorrent
http://migraineheartache.com/wp/2004/08/20/bittorrent-what-the-heck-is-a-bittorrent-dark-tips/
http://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/bittorrent_faq.cfm
http://www.e-consumerguide.com/bittorrent/glossary.html