Shorten (shn) support has arrived!
Reply #6 – 2003-03-01 16:04:09
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)