Topic: Question about SHN....

[macroint]

I have a show that's almost 4 hours, no set break (3cd)...in order to make this 2shn's, I would need to stick a track from early in the show on the second shn (or a track from the end of the show on the first shn). Being anal retentive, I would just as soon make this 3shn in order to maintain a sense of continuity:

SHN1: Tracks 1-20
SHN2: Tracks 21-32
SHN3: Tracks 33-42

SHN1: Tracks 1-21, 23-25
SHN2: Track 22, 26-42

Which is the more preferred method? I just don't want to do anything to confuse people.

[eric.B]

I would say fit it on two disks because I would think that most who know what the heck a .shn file is, are smart enough to figure that out...
plus, I usually drag and drop all audio files for a .shn or flac set within another folder named WAVESyourband2004-10-32 yada yada, which will arrange the tracks in order anyway.

but..  you can do it the other way if you want. Im not going to stop you   

[Nick Graham]

My advice would be to encode to FLAC, not SHN...it's amazing how much less space they take up.

Case in point - I recently downloaded 2 sources of the same Derek Trucks show, one in FLAC, one in SHN. The SHN was 787 MB, the FLAC? Only 596 MB.

If it's only a matter of one track making it 3 discs...I guarantee FLAC will be small enough to fit everything on 2 discs and keep everything continuous.

[urobouros]

My advice would be to encode to FLAC, not SHN...it's amazing how much less space they take up.

Case in point - I recently downloaded 2 sources of the same Derek Trucks show, one in FLAC, one in SHN. The SHN was 787 MB, the FLAC? Only 596 MB.

If it's only a matter of one track making it 3 discs...I guarantee FLAC will be small enough to fit everything on 2 discs and keep everything continuous.

FLAC is much smaller and totally lossless.  Much better than SHN IMO.

[Swampy]

Ya, I dont really understand why people are still doing SHN...

[greenone]

My advice would be to encode to FLAC, not SHN...it's amazing how much less space they take up.

Case in point - I recently downloaded 2 sources of the same Derek Trucks show, one in FLAC, one in SHN. The SHN was 787 MB, the FLAC? Only 596 MB.

If it's only a matter of one track making it 3 discs...I guarantee FLAC will be small enough to fit everything on 2 discs and keep everything continuous.

While I agree that FLAC's compression is better, I very much doubt that it's just a FLAC vs. SHN thing on the sizes of those two filesets...the SHN set was likely normalized or was just plain louder than the FLAC set somehow. The more "information" there is in a file, the worse the compression ratio will be when you encode it...

I admit, I still use SHN, though I'm slowly switching over. Just laziness and comfort level, I guess, plus a couple bad experiences with corrupted FLACs that forced me to re-transfer an entire show that was a PITA to transfer in the first place because the tape got eaten.

[admkrk]

no problems mixing shn files unless you listen to them by disc on the computer.  no matter what order you put them in, when decoded to one file they will all get put in the right order(or if you just copy them to one folder and use "winamp" for example to play the shns).

if this works, then i might think about switching to flac.

[Swampy]

huh?

[admkrk]

which statement confused you?  or was it both

[Swampy]

the first one, sorry

[admkrk]

i kinda figured that. rereading it, it is a little mixed up. 

no matter what order the shn are in on disc, when decoded w/ mkw they'll get "ordered" in the output folder. w/ shntool you need to copy them to hd first, that alone would put them in order. if you are playing shns through winamp off the disc, i think they would play in what ever order they are on on the disc. that would be the only time i can think it would make a difference. outside of simply being neater.

hope it sounds clearer now.

[Swampy]

I get it now

[mmmatt]

When you are decoding directly from the CD to the HD it sucks when the files are split to different disks on your backups, because the md5 files throw errors if all the files are not on the same drive.  With flac you can have the option of verifing the files indiviually or as a group (with an MD5).  I archive everything in FLAC with an MD5, and that works best for me.  I've found flac to be substantially smaller and that often makes a difference in the number of discs.  I've also converted many shn file sets to flac.  lossless > lossless = lossless

Matt