[mstaggerlee]

I've recently downloaded the earliest Dispatch show posted on the llama (dispatch1996-04-16), in .shn format. A notice on the page this show was posted on stated that the files should not be converted to mp3, by request of the band.

I have a strong preference for .flac files over .shns (winamp's flac performance is far better than with .shns, and Nero will convert flacs to CDDA on the fly when/if you want to burn a disc), so after running the checksums (they all passed) I tried to convert the shns to flac format, using TLH v 2.6.0, build 168 (pretty sure this is the latest). Of the 19 files, only 2 generated error messages (child encoder process had non-zero exit status), but I only found 8 flac files in the folder after conversion!

Amazed, I repeated the conversion. Sure enough, several files simply vanish just as the next file is being written. Never one to give up easily, I decoded the .shns to .wav. This process seemed to go very smoothly. No error messages, and on testing all but 5 .wav files were all found to look like CDDA with 100% confidence, the remainder with 99%, and I noted no correlation between the 99%ers and the shns that wouldn't convert.

But anyway, now that the files are in .wav format, it should be a simple matter to simply convert them to .flac, right?

Well, not so much, as it turns out. All 19 files did indeed convert, but the 11 tracks that would not convert directly from shn to flac all produced an error message (file is truncated or otherwise corrupt). These 11 flacs seem to play just fine in winamp, but I still felt kinda hinky about them.

So, I tested them and all 11 produced the following error -
file is decodable without error, but flac fingerprint cannot be checked, since it was unset in the streaminfo block.

Also, if I attempt to decode these .flacs back to .wav, for the same 11 tracks I get the same error message, and those .wavs vanish just like the flacs did on direct conversion.

So ... any ideas about what's goin' on here?