SHN > FLAC conversions with foobar2000 0.8.3

[TheMamba]

I am in the process of converting some of my SHN based shows to FLAC with foobar 2000 v 0.8.3.

Futzed around with conversions just to test it out and now I'm starting to pay a little more attention on the "real" go around.

This very minute I'm doing a Rage Against the Machine show that I just got off of EZT. The lineage is questionable in that the info file only states, "Soundboard, liberated bootleg"

I'm getting the following output from foobar:

INFO (foo_bitcompare) : Comparing:
INFO (foo_bitcompare) : location: "file://C:\Documents and Settings\Tom\Desktop\Torrents\RATM\014 ratm2000-02-04d1t14.flac" (0)
INFO (foo_bitcompare) : location: "file://C:\Documents and Settings\Tom\Desktop\Torrents\RATM\ratm2000-02-04d1t14.shn" (0)
INFO (foo_shn) : cannot find / read external metadata tag file
INFO (foo_shn) : cannot find / load external seektable file.
INFO (foo_shn) : no seektable loaded. generating seek information on the fly.
INFO (foo_bitcompare) : No differences in decoded data found.
INFO (foo_bitcompare) : Finished successfully.

Now, it says that there were no differences found, and I'm cool with that.

The part where it says that it cannot find / read external blah blah blah. No seektable loaded, etc.

Is this cause for concern?

[RainDawg]

No cause for concern here. foo_shn is the SHN decoder plugin for foobar2000. This is jsut giving you a little feedback about the SHN file:

INFO (foo_shn) : cannot find / read external metadata tag file

This means that there is no .tag file associated with the SHN file. Since SHN does not have any inherant support for tagging, foo_shn can write metadeta to a .tag file. This obviously doesn't have one, but that's fine.

INFO (foo_shn) : cannot find / load external seektable file.

Again, foo_shn is looking for either appended to external seektables. It didn't find any, which means that the SHNs are not seekable (in most other players). The line below that, however, shows just one reason why foobar is the best player out there: it is making up for the lack of a seektable by generating one on the fly so that the end user will never have to worry if the original files were seekable or not.

The foo_bitcompare plugin is just telling you which files it is comparing, and then returns the result that no differences were found. You've successfully completed an SHN > FLAC conversion!

[TheMamba]

Cool. Didn't think it was a problem....just wanted to double check.

Thanks!

[tall_leaping]

make sure and get your shntool md5's ;)

[RainDawg]

make sure and get your shntool md5's ;)
No need...he's got FLAC files now. They have a FLAC fingerprint, which is an identical value as the shntool md5! The shntool md5 thing is only useful for SHN/APE seeds that don't have inherant fingerprint support.