[cooltheglobe]

YES, go with the FLAC, kids! Very much more actively-supported.. and the F stands for FREE as in freedom from proprietary madness, a la Linux and BSD which is where you'll find yourself after studying computers for decades.
An interesting sidenote-- I discovered, buried in the manual for one of my cheap-o Sylvania mp3players that I'd grabbed at BigLots, that it plays .ape files! Lossless compression support, completely unadvertised! So I went and got the required wares (pretty much only for Winbloze, but I dualboot anyways, and from Linux run the commandline version from scripts utilising "wine".)
... the most recent update to the sw is dated, but it works great and get this.... THE BEST compression of any lossless format! Maybe you dont think its a big deal, but it all adds up-- especially on a cheesy 4G player. Transcoded fast, too-- faster than flac I think. Doubt the support for scanning around in the file while playing on computer is there, though.. havent tested it much yet.

ps my impression was always that SHN originated from the Mac world. (Maybe back in the 680x0 days??) The main thing for me is.. .flac can get dragged directly into k3b (the top-notch linux burning program) and on-the-fly crank out your discs at top speed.. no creating wav files on your poor, overworked HD (which if its like mine is nearly full anyway!) No .shn plugin for k3b. There's one for Nero, but it's way, way slower than the .flac one!

Happy NYE