Yeah, FLAC support these days is much better than that for Shorten. For instance, there are FLAC plugins for pretty much every major media player in Linux, but our only options for Shorten playback are either an XMMS plugin or command-line playback. Since I've never gotten XMMS to compile properly, I'm having to run foobar2000 under Wine to playback Shorten files. I really don't know why there isn't a gstreamer plugin for Shorten.

The only problem with FLACs is that if you use etree's md5check script and some idiot included md5s with their FLAC files, it will check both the md5s and the fingerprints, so it takes twice as long as it should to check the files. This is why you should never include md5s with FLAC files--just include a text file with the fingerprints.