Why SHN format for shows posted here?

[acapulcogold]

I was just curious as to why the majority of shows that are posted here are in SHN format?

Is this some sort of preference that Floyd collectors have?, and if it is a preference, why do you prefer it over formats like Flac? or APE?

Cheers

[mooncusser]

I think we see a pretty good mix of SHN and FLAC, with the more recent items being in FLAC. SHN is still used but I think we see it on some of the older items. Don't think we've ever seen much in APE, but that's fine with me as my personal preference is for FLAC first and then SHN.

[MarchingHammers]

I'm not sure if I can give a definitive answer but if I had to guess on one I would say that SHN in the past was a bit more developed than FLAC at the time.

Now the roles have reversed. FLAC files have more control over what you can achieve in the overall audio editing process and automatically lets you seek to any point in a track, whereas SHN you have to create a .skt file to let you do as such.


-MH

[tjmack]

As has already been suggested, it's simply because SHN was the first of the audio formats to be widely accepted.

A large number of these shows come from the DC hubs where they've been traded in their original released format for years, and where there's a general rule not to change from the original archive format files.

T.

[Novak]

In real terms, does the format matter??

If you encode, use what you like to use. If you decode, get what software you require.

I'm sure there's all kinds of arguments as to which encodes and decodes best, but what you end up chossing is up to you i guess.

Novak

[oldpink]

The most obvious reason to me is that SHN is an older format for lossless WAV compression over the superior in every way FLAC.
Therefore, there is still quite a lot of material out there that was compressed with SHN, and no one bothered to decompress, then re-encode to FLAC.
Speaking for myself, I always store my audio files in FLAC format.
FLAC has much better seek support, significantly greater compression, informative meta tag support, and (best of all!) is a completely open source piece of software that is free and ported to several operating systems, including my beloved Linux.
Why worry about what format seeders use if you can simply do as I do, seeing as how there is no real mystery about to decompress those SHN files, then convert to FLAC; even for me, as - yes - there is even a port of Shorten (SHN compressor/decompressor) sitting on my Linux box right now.

[acapulcogold]

Appreciate the responses to my question.

Just wanted to clarify though, I didn't raise the question about why most Floyd shows are in SHN format because I found it to be a bother or anything of a negative nature ( I have SHN plugins for all my programs that play and burn live music)

I was just curious about whether SHN was a preferred method of audio encoding amongst Floyd fans, and if so, I was hoping for an explaination about why.

I found it curious because the majority of live music I come across is in flac format, and seems to be more popular than SHN these days.

But as some people know, just because something is popular, doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.

But I do appreciate the responses to my question.

Cheers

[oldpink]

It is no contest: FLAC is superior in every way, mainly for the reasons that I cited earlier.
SHN just got there first.

[plains203]

Excatly what OldPink said. Shn was there first but is inferior to FLAC. Shn is fine but compression ratio's are lower and the player support is lower. There are also standalone players that support Flac now. Most new shows are circulated as Flac.

[tjmack]

It is no contest: FLAC is superior in every way, mainly for the reasons that I cited earlier.
SHN just got there first.

Exactly, so don't go Flac'ing up files just for the sake of a few MBs. If the filles came to you in SHN, keep them that way.

T.