Foobar2000 SHN > FLAC Conversion: A Visual Guide

Originally Posted by bodeaga

and if left as shn like the taper/uploader intended them to be it would only be about 11.5 hours.
seams to me converting 7 gigs from shn to flac it a very large waste of time and ruins the integrity of that show.....
shn to flac is for your head only and not trading.... if you got the time to convert all that .... lucky you....

Yeah it'll take some time to convert if you already have the show. But if you don't have the show and are downloading it for the first time, and it is seeded in FLAC, not SHN, it saves you a lot of time. Why not save the hundreds, or thousands of people who will grab the reseed the trouble of converting for playback on their portables or home servers or future disc players? Someone might say that they convert to .mp3 for playback on their portable anyway. Well that takes a lot of time too! If I had a 10 GB, or 20 GB or 30 GB player I'd rather save the time converting FLAC > .mp3 and just put the shows on my player as FLAC, and rotate out shows after I've listened to them a few times. I'm rambling, but if you have a show in lossless on your iPod, you can transfer it to your friend's comp if you are visiting, then they have a lossless copy of the show!

At the risk of here is another thing: the inclination to never change SHN .md5's and TTH roots can be used as justification to never fix SBE's or other problems. Someone gets a show, runs the len check and finds out there are SBE's. Then he fixes them before burning to CD, which consumes a little time and temporary disk space. A noob gets the same show, decodes, and burns a CD. There are pops between tracks, and he has just wasted a CD-R. You hard core never-convert people would at least agree that fixing SHN sets that have SBEs and convering to FLAC (since the TTH root is changed anyway) in a standard way should happen, right? The standard way of fixing SBEs could be: fix one set of .wav's at a time (for multiset shows), backward shift, pad last track with zero bytes.

Also, say someone converts a bunch of SHNs to FLAC and seeds them. Some time goes by, and other people who already have the SHNs want to convert to this same FLAC set as well. By this time, FLAC has updated to a newer version, so compressing with the newer version will give a different TTH root than the compression with the older version. No problem, sourceforge has old versions of FLAC that can be downloaded and installed, and will yield the same TTH root as compression originally done with the old version of FLAC. Also you can enter the same tags (if they had tags) and replay gain as the old FLAC version.

[Mooner]

Tubular.

You have considered the personal preferences and idiosyncratic opinions of those who are determined to take standard, well founded trading practices and toss them out the window.
You haven't considered the firmly established trading community or how it maintains order and quality. You haven't considered how what you propose will affect the stability of the future trading community. You haven't considered the taper's decision of how a show is released. You haven't considered lineage or integrity.
I doubt I can change your mind on this topic, but it's important for those who read your posts to know that there are serious repercussions to the trading community at large when a commonly traded show suddenly surfaces in a new format. Rule #1 for any seasoned trader is "Never alter a recording and then reissue it to the community as 'original'".

[Five]

you are confusing the audio for the container. nothing is being advertised as 'original'

a shntool md5 (st5) is generated from the decompressed audio. there is no need to be tied to SHN files that aren't seekable and associated md5 checksums. Mooner, you're preaching like it is still 2003. We're not talking about changing an single bit of the audio contained in the shn files.

[Mooner]

No, perhaps we're not talking about changing a single bit of audio, but we're certainly talking about changing the lineage of (ultimately) hundreds of terabytes of traded shows, and making the original audio data obsolete. This presents nightmares of confusion for those who volunteer their time maintaining the integrity of traded music, and also for those who have spent years/decades collecting that music.
In order to preserve the music, one must also preserve the history.

[Five]

you're posting hypothetical stuff here... converting from shn to flac has helped the community. the conversion of the SHN portion of a/b road to flac saves aprox 7GB of space and no confusion at all. please give some specific examples of where a shn to flac conversion has caused confusion and a loss of integrity in an audio files set.

There are tons of shows that circulate with sector boundary errors (SBEs), and they get reseeded all the time unchanged. The only reason for this that I can think of is that everyone is afraid to change the original data. For those who are experienced it is not much of a problem, they do a len check before burning a CD. But for those new to trading and torrenting lossless, they waste a lot of CD-Rs and experience a lot of frustration (was it the burn? did I not do it right? was it my download? just WTF is going on?) before they find out how to fix it (if they ever find out how). And it is all because there is no accepted, standard way to fix them, and people are hesitant to mess with history and the original data. This hesitation and reticence is a big loss to the community IMO.

The same can be said for converting SHN to FLAC. What if in 5 years most universal Blu-Ray/DVD/CD/MP3 players supported FLAC? Everyone's FLAC data discs could also be played back on their disc players, but none of their SHN discs could. So unseekable, SBE filled, header issue ridden SHNs should still be traded in 50 years just to preserve the original fileset? Give me a break. Here is a list of players that currently support FLAC (not SHN): http://flac.sourceforge.net/links.html#hardware

A major consumer brand, Denon, supports FLAC:
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/denon-lin...ons-281952.php

Some 2007 Denon AV Receivers support FLAC (kick ass IMO!!, means disc players are probably right around the corner):
http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-9749863-1.html

[direwolf-pgh]

im enjoying this..

the best part for me is that .shn is near obsolete - like .mkw files.

-wait till the community decides that any encoding less than 24bit is lame we get to re-rip and re-download all over again.

..sorry for the interruption..

mooner what 'history' are you talking about ? Im very interested to hear about it.

[U2Lynne]

Whenever I have seeded a show where I fixed the SBEs, I have included the old fingerprints in the text file, along with the new fingerprints and the shntool len. And, of course, I note in the lineage that the show went "flac > xACT (fix SBEs) > flac".

I think Mooner is talking about that prehistoric period when Wooly Mammoths roamed the Earth and men were hunter/gatherers....

Ahhh 1998.....SHNs....yo queiro Taco Bell.....Gettin' Jiggy Wit It....

Cars used to have carburetors, now they have fuel injection. Progress

[MourningStar]

hi - i need to do this conversion. however, i'm on a WinME machine and the foobar s/w requires a newer os. does anyone have a win-me compatible foobar version they can hook me up with? thnx!

[MourningStar]

Nevermind - I found one.

[patrick1963]

Using shntool ...

shntool conv -o flac *shn

using this to convert shn > flac but I would like to set flac level to 8. How?