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The most common way of distributing a tape to more than one person (i.e. through a trade or blanks) is through a tape tree. However, trees are typically large, and involve a loss of generation at each level of the structure. One alternative is what are called tape "vines". In both structure, the digital (D) tapers are at the top, to prevent loss of quality through generations, but in a tape tree, there is generational decay for each analog (A) step in the process.   In a tape vine, there are a series of analog tapers; the last one send blanks and postage to the DAT person at the head of the vine (aka a "shoot"), and the master tape then moves down the vine, getting copied by each person, until the original master (i.e. the first copies made, on the very blanks that were sent to the DAT person) make it back to the person who first sent them off. This structure minimizes generational loss, since every gets either an analog master or a copy of one.
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