[Zarathustra19]

I just downloaded an audience recording of Gary Jules encoded into the lossless format known as Shorten. I'd never heard of it until now. How does this file format compare to say...FLAC or ALAC? I don't notice anything really different; same(ish) file sizes, same sound quality, etc. Thoughts?

 

[TheMarchingMule]

What program did you use to listen to it?

 

[Zarathustra19]

Foobar has a plugin, as well as winamp. I'm using foobar.

 

[tot]

Shorten is old (maybe the oldest) free lossless format. It has been obsoleted by flac and rarely seen anymore.

 

[Redo]

Shorten was popular when lossless audio was virtually unknown, but it is pretty obsolete now. It was most popular for trading live recordings. The compression ratios and software support is nowhere near as good as FLAC. The CPU demands on encoding and decoding are also pretty high. I believe there is no real support or updates on shorten anymore either.


I'm sure there's a bunch of other improvements FLAC has over shorten. In the end, FLAC still is the best lossless codec

. Now only if Apple and WMP would officially support FLAC, it would be an industry standard overnight.

 

[EnOYiN]

Here is a comparison with FLAC and some other lossless codecs.

 

[krmathis]

Shorten is a old format. It is not very popular because its feature less, and have little to none software support.
The sound quality are the same on all lossless codecs (hence the name), but their compression rates/speeds vary depending on the encoders efficiency.

I suggest you read this:
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index....ess_comparison

 

[vcoheda]

i have a few shorten files. an older lossless format.

 

[chelrob]

I find a lot of shorten files and I usually decode them back to wav and then encode to flac for archiving and playback on my H140.

 

[krmathis]

Quote:

Originally Posted by chelrob /img/forum/go_quote.gif I find a lot of shorten files and I usually decode them back to wav and then encode to flac for archiving and playback on my H140.

Yes, thats the benefit with lossless codecs.
It don't matter if its compressed with an old and inferior codec, as you can always transcode to a different codec. Lossless of course...

 

[Redo]

Quote:

Originally Posted by krmathis /img/forum/go_quote.gif Yes, thats the benefit with lossless codecs. It don't matter if its compressed with an old and inferior codec, as you can always transcode to a different codec. Lossless of course...

Yup, but tagging and gapless info gets lost in the mix (did shorten even have gapless anything?)

 

[krmathis]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Redo /img/forum/go_quote.gif Yup, but tagging and gapless info gets lost in the mix (did shorten even have gapless anything?)

Depending on the software used, its fully possible to transfer tags to the new file.
I don't think Shorten had gapless playback anyway...

 

[werdwerdus]

shorten doesn't have tags... so not useful to me. also much worse compression.

just use foobar2000 to convert to FLAC