[range_hood]

Originally Posted by feralicious

What if I'm going straight from shn>flac? I use foobar.

If no error shows up on reencoding, then the files are fine in terms of "properly decoding".
To compare if the audio contents match after converting you can use a batchfile (by uhclem). Sure, if you fix sector boundary errors, the files will not match anymore.
_____________
@echo off
for %%T in (*.shn) do shntool cmp %%T %%~nT.flac
pause
_____________

Or you create st5s of shns and flacs and compare by eye:
967c57a1a178f952f931a5a090252c8d [shntool] ns2002-11-18t01.shn
bff785557d40fff55dea7e5784583d31 [shntool] ns2002-11-18t02.shn
967c57a1a178f952f931a5a090252c8d [shntool] ns2002-11-18t01.flac
bff785557d40fff55dea7e5784583d31 [shntool] ns2002-11-18t02.flac

Originally Posted by feralicious

So... if the md5 is a must, then why do people think you don't need them for flacs? I don't see what the difference is if "testing" isn't enough for shns why would it be for flacs?

On flacs "test encoded files" (TraderLittleHelper) or "Verify" (FlacFrontend) the files are decoded, the checksums calculated and compared to the checksum in the header in just one step. If there´s a problem on decoding, it will show up; if the checksums do not match, it will show up.
Shns do not have checksum informations included. That´s why you need an textfile.

Originally Posted by feralicious

When someone says "whole file md5" that's not the same as an st5, right? That's like an md5 of all the tracks?

st5 is the calculated checksum of the decompressed (decoded) audio content only.
it´s the same as a flac fingerprint, just in another text format but also usable for other audio formats like shn, ape, ....

ffp:
beatles-urt-d1t01.flac:95fd6f5e85fab21a1a84e9447af3d6bd
beatles-urt-d1t02.flac:b0ae6b35acc4f4eea9783154444ee829
st5:
95fd6f5e85fab21a1a84e9447af3d6bd [shntool] beatles-urt-d1t01.flac
b0ae6b35acc4f4eea9783154444ee829 [shntool] beatles-urt-d1t02.flac

In wholefile md5s of audio files a checksum of the whole file is calculated (including headers, tags, etc.; no decoding is done).