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Topic: Shorten (shn) support has arrived! (Read 7931 times) previous topic - next topic
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Shorten (shn) support has arrived!

2003-03-04 02:56 GMT+1: updated to public beta 4, edited download locations
2003-03-02 03:22 GMT+1: ftp download fixed
2003-03-02 03:03 GMT+1: updated to public beta 3
2003-03-01 17:16 GMT+1: added (extremely) temporary ftp download location
2003-03-01 17:11 GMT+1: added geocities download page
2003-03-01 16:17 GMT+1: updated to public beta 2

Component name: foo_shn.dll
Component name: Public Beta 4
Component type: input plugin
foobar2000 version: 0.5x
Description of the component: Shorten (shn) decoder w/ seeking support for -all- shn files. The decoder has been written from scratch in C++.
Compile date: 2003-03-04 02:37 GMT+1
Temporary download link: http://www.geocities.com/ssamadhi97/foo_shn.html (sorry 'bout ads)

plugin notes:
Quote
foo_shn.dll

Shorten input plugin for Foobar2000 audio player.


Public Beta 4
compiled for fb2k 0.5x on 2003-03-04 02:37 GMT+1


Authors' notes:
- Shorten is teh lower quality format. avoid it if you can.


Features:
- decodes all Shorten file (..err. it should, really!)
- supports sample-accurate seeking
- supports seeking in -all- Shorten files:
 * support for internal seektables if -p < 4 and -m < 5 used for encoding
   (default behaviour of shorten.exe)
 * dynamic (in-memory) generation of seektables for all other files without
   appended seektable - forward seeking is done brute-force in those cases
   (slow, duh)
- properly skips ancillary riff data blocks (as opposed to the WA2 plugin :B )
- doesn't crash the player (as opposed to the WA2 plugin :B )


Known Bugs:
- none


Planned features:
- support external seektables
- parse metadata from text files (geared towards traders)
- generate/support external tag files? uh..


Version History:

Public Beta 4:
- seektable / seeking support reworked and added for all kinds of weird-ass
 shn encoding parameters  ~ ss
- uninitialized variable that (potentially and actually) caused wacky behaviour
 tracked down and eliminated  ~ PP (thanks!)
- fixed issues with non-shn-files renamed to .shn  ~ ss

Public Beta 3:
- playing time calculation fixed  ~ ss

Public Beta 2:
- fixed offset and bitshift in channel decoder for DIFF0 and QLPC predictors
 (those bugs did cause some occasional clicks)  ~ ss

Public Beta 1:
- seektables are not loaded before playback is actually started  ~ ss

beta2:
- plugin crashed when shorten stream had verbatim block before the end (fixed)
 ~ fs


coded by foosion and ssamadhi97

"sounds like new quality of bork input plugin" ~ PP


Go nuts. Throw your entire Shorten collection at it, seek like a madman, whatever. Please post bug reports here or pm me.

And remember: Shorten IST Death.
A riddle is a short sword attached to the next 2000 years.

 

Shorten (shn) support has arrived!

Reply #1
The link at that URL doesn't work...

- Chris

Shorten (shn) support has arrived!

Reply #2
fixed.   

sorry 'bout that.
A riddle is a short sword attached to the next 2000 years.

Shorten (shn) support has arrived!

Reply #3
plugin dll updated to public beta 2, go get it.

some minor fixes in the decoder (see changelog), should fix some audible glitches.

A riddle is a short sword attached to the next 2000 years.

Shorten (shn) support has arrived!

Reply #4
May I ask what shorten files are? Obviously they are audio files, i guess, but how's it different from the tens of others out there?

Shorten (shn) support has arrived!

Reply #5
It would be nice if I could actually download it. Everytime I click on the link it takes me to your page. Then when I click on the link that is supposed to start the download, it takes me to another page that is supposed to start the download. Then that page loads loads your main page which has site news.

Shorten (shn) support has arrived!

Reply #6
sure. Shorten (by Tony Robinson / SoftSound) is a lossless audio compression format (originally intended for the compression of voice material, but it performs quite ok on music as well)

Shorten itself is a relatively low complexity format - even the quite well-structured and unoptimized C++ shn decoder in this plugin demands less than 2% of my cpu time on my athlon600 for real-time playback.

Shorten does NOT support tagging or any other kinds of direct metadata storage, and seeking support is a dirty hack specific to the old WinAmp / XMMS plugins.

Source code for Shorten is available, and to the best of my knowledge using Shorten for encoding music is free for any non-commercial purposes, while decoding is free for everyone.


Here is how it is different from the tens of others out there: Since it is by far superior to zip/rar for music compression, it has been adopted as the format of choice for trading of losslessly compressed concert recordings by the trading community organzied through etree.org, which is by a far cry the biggest of such communities. This happened back in 1997/1998 (if I remember correctly), before any of the more sophisticated formats like FLAC or Monkey's Audio reached maturity. 

So Shorten is special because it has a huge and loyal following in the community of lossless music traders (even though I for one wish it would finally die out and be replaced by FLAC/APE)
A riddle is a short sword attached to the next 2000 years.

Shorten (shn) support has arrived!

Reply #7
Quote
Then when I click on the link that is supposed to start the download, it takes me to another page that is supposed to start the download.

wtf? when I click on the download link, the download starts.. duh.

"right-click, save as" does not work though.. grr. *curses at host*
A riddle is a short sword attached to the next 2000 years.

Shorten (shn) support has arrived!

Reply #8
MyAdviceIha (and everybody else who has problems w/ downloading the file), please try to get it from here:

http://www.geocities.com/ssamadhi97/foo_shn.html


(edit: removed ftp location)
A riddle is a short sword attached to the next 2000 years.

Shorten (shn) support has arrived!

Reply #9
[deleted]

Shorten (shn) support has arrived!

Reply #10
I have pm'd you, ssamadhi97 but...

thank you very much for the plugin...

the future feature of parsing the .txt file is a sweet idea. I have tried messing around with the hillsboro tools that do this same kind of thing, but to no avail...

the shn plugin works fine on this end.

many thanks.

Shorten (shn) support has arrived!

Reply #11
Thank you very much. I was able to get it from one of the 2 links you provided. Time to try it out now.

Shorten (shn) support has arrived!

Reply #12
Thanks.

I've been listening to shns for more than a month now with various versions of this plugin and didn't encounter many problems, so it should be quite stable / robust already. Haven't thoroughly tested it with incomplete / broken files though.


TrNSZ:

memory leaks: none are known to me right now. But if you play a shn without internal seektable, the memory for the generated seeking information is allocated dynamically, this might look like a little memory leak at the first glance. This should not exceed let's say 100kb even for very long shns though.

conversion: just tested, looks like I gotta fix the playing time calculation  otherwise it worked fine so far (but it's still quite slow)

tagging: the Shorten format itself does not support any kind of tagging..

replaygain: was quite useful for stress-testing the plugin


but please be my guest and knock yourself out with further testing if you feel like it    any kind of bug report or positive feedback is welcome.

Oh yeah, if anybody manages to find an incomplete or screwed shn file that causes serious (reproducable) problems with the plugin: I'd like to have it 
A riddle is a short sword attached to the next 2000 years.

Shorten (shn) support has arrived!

Reply #13
Quote
Great job so far.  When you are finished, I'd suggest talking with Peter to see if you can get SHN support included with the main distribution sometime in the future.

Guess we'll go for that as soon as it looks like the plugin does not misbehave on any shn file we throw at it. Maybe after support for external seektables has been added.

oh, btw:

conversion: resulting pcm data is bit-identical to mkw-generated output.

obviously ancillary riff/aiff chunks are missing though  (remember that Shorten is a riff-wav/aiff compressor, not just a pcm compressor...)
A riddle is a short sword attached to the next 2000 years.

Shorten (shn) support has arrived!

Reply #14
fixed a minor problem with playing time calculation (it's correct now (w00t)).

updated to public beta 3 anyway, to make it look like I'm getting some serious work done here   
A riddle is a short sword attached to the next 2000 years.

Shorten (shn) support has arrived!

Reply #15
plugin updated to pb4:
  • added & corrected support in general and seeking support in particular for files that have been created using more obscure (and silly) encoder settings.
  • fixed gh3y problem with non-shn-files renamed to .shn
  • this version of the shn input plugin should work with pretty much any file you throw at it. prove me wrong! :B

post errors, bug reports & feature requests (automatic shn -> flac transcoding?  ) etc here or pm me.
A riddle is a short sword attached to the next 2000 years.

Shorten (shn) support has arrived!

Reply #16
MyAdviceIha (and everybody else who has problems w/ downloading the file), please try to get it from here:

http://www.geocities.com/ssamadhi97/foo_shn.html


(edit: removed ftp location)


Having updated to Foobar2000 v0.9.4.2 and having lost the shn dll I found this post, but, clicking on your link takes me to http://www.geocities.com/ssamadhi97/foo_shn.html with a note that it has moved, clicking on the link on that page to go to where it's been moved takes me to http://www.stud.uni-karlsruhe.de/%7Euybc/ with an error message on the page

"Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /~uybc/ on this server.

Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request."

It seems to have become difficult to track down the shn dll these days.

Shorten (shn) support has arrived!

Reply #17
The 0.9 compatible version is part of the "stable components package" on my components page (see signature).

Shorten (shn) support has arrived!

Reply #18
Edit: beaten by foosion. Anyway, Google really is your friend.

Shorten (shn) support has arrived!

Reply #19
The 0.9 compatible version is part of the "stable components package" on my components page (see signature).


Many thanks, shorten now playing.  Amazing, some of the shn files I have are zipped and I just realized Foobar can read and play from the zipped folders.

Shorten (shn) support has arrived!

Reply #20
foo_input_shorten 0.4.2.1

Changes in this version:
  • Encoding field in technical information is set to "lossless". You need to reload information from files to see this.
  • Bundled icon for file format associations (shn.ico).

Shorten (shn) support has arrived!

Reply #21
Thanks Foosion, i was wondering why in the Encoding field in technical information was not to "lossless" before. Thanks for making it now show, and thanks for the icon.