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Old 2004-11-23, 06:45 AM
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RainDawg RainDawg is offline
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Join Date: Oct 2004
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Re: FLAC, SHN, Conversions, etc...A virtual potpourri

Yes, I can help....you're asking quite a few questions here, and there's a LOT of information that you'll need to understand before moving on. The good thing is that you've already discovered the answer to the question, but likely don't reaize it yet!

The answer, as usual, is foobar2000. It can do direct conversions from SHN > FLAC and also do something called BitVerify, where it will confirm that the FLAC you created is acoustically identical to the SHN file it was sourced from: THIS IS A VERY IMPORTANT STEP FOR SHN > FLAC CONVERSION!

foobar2000 is also the answer to all your tagging needs as well, but let me discuss that in another post....

As for converting, it is acceptable and encourage to convert SHN to FLAC, as the former is an outdated and obsolete codec. FLAC has numerous advantages, and you can read a little more about the major differences in the FAQ's audio types and descriptions entry:
http://www.thetradersden.org/forums/...#faq_filetypes

Now, foobar2000 is the complete solution to PLAYING your files, but you may not realize that it comes with an enormous amount of plugins that help you do everything else with those files too. First, make sure you've got the Special Installer version 0.8.3 (the most complete and up to date version) from the foobar2000 blogiste.

When you install this program, make sure you include all of the plugins (some may not be useful to you, but they are all fun to play with and learn what options are out there). This will make sure that you have the diskwriter plugin, which will allow you to do direct file conversions.

After that, it's quite simple. Drag a bunch of SHN files into the playlist window, select the, right click, and say "Convert". A window should pop-up asking you what to convert to. Pick FLAC and the compression level (all of them are lossless, but the higher compression values will take more time to perform). It will take several minutes to convert. Afterwards, clear the playlist, and then drag all of the original SHN files and the new FLAC files into the playlist window. Select all of both formats, right click, and say "BitCompare". It will then run through and check that for each SHN file, there FLAC file of the same name is acoustically identical. Assuming everthing went well, it'll report that the files are identical, and you've done it correctly!

Always include in your lineage how you did to the files what you did. The above example would include:

SHN > foobar2000 0.8.3 (convered and bitverified identical) > FLAC


Note: this will NOT look at, change, or correct any sector boundary issues. If you have SBEs that you need to correct, this needs to be done with shntool. If you run a conversion with FLAC Frontend, there IS an option to correct SBEs, but if the files are in the wrong order in the original window, you're going to have screw up the entire set.

OK...I'll make another post for tagging....
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