Shorten (SHN) is a

file format A file format is a standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary or free. Some file format ...

used for compressing audio data. It is a form of

data compression In information theory, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Any particular compression is either lossy or lossless. Lossless compressio ...

of files and is used to losslessly compress CD-quality audio files (44.1 kHz 16- bit stereo

PCM Pulse-code modulation (PCM) is a method used to digitally represent sampled analog signals. It is the standard form of digital audio in computers, compact discs, digital telephony and other digital audio applications. In a PCM stream, the am ...

). Shorten is no longer developed and other lossless

audio codec An audio codec is a device or computer program capable of encoding or decoding a digital data stream (a codec) that encodes or decodes audio. In software, an audio codec is a computer program implementing an algorithm that compresses and decompres ...

s such as

FLAC FLAC (; Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference softwa ...

, Monkey's Audio (APE), TTA, and WavPack (WV) have become more popular. However, Shorten is still in use by some people because there are legally traded concert recordings in circulation that are encoded as Shorten files. Shorten files use the .shn file extension.

Handling Shorten files

Since few players or media writers attempt to decompress Shorten files, a standalone decompression program is usually required to convert to a different file format that those applications can handle. Some Rockbox applications can play Shorten files without decompression, and third-party Shorten plug-ins exist for Nero Burning ROM,

Foobar2000 foobar2000 (often abbreviated as fb2k or f2k) is a freeware audio player for Microsoft Windows, iOS and Android developed by Peter Pawłowski. It has a modular design, which provides user flexibility in configuration and customization. Stan ...

, and

Winamp Winamp is a media player for Microsoft Windows originally developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev by their company Nullsoft, which they later sold to AOL in 1999 for $80 million. It was then acquired by Radionomy in 2014. Since ve ...

. All

libavcodec libavcodec is a free and open-source library of codecs for encoding and decoding video and audio data. libavcodec is an integral part of many open-source multimedia applications and frameworks. The popular MPV, xine and VLC media players u ...

based players and converters support the Shorten codec.

Converting on Linux

Current versions of

ffmpeg FFmpeg is a free and open-source software project consisting of a suite of libraries and programs for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams. At its core is the command-line ffmpeg tool itself, designed for processing of vid ...

or avconv support the shorten format. To convert all .shn files in the current directory to FLAC on

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, whi ...

: for f in *.shn; do ffmpeg -i "$f" "$"; done There are also various GUI programs which can be used, like SoundConverter.

Converting on Windows

A similar command using the freely available

for the

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...

command line: for /r %i in (*.shn) do ffmpeg -i "%~ni%~xi" "%~ni.flac"For a GUI-based solution, dBpoweramp can be used, however on a 64-bit version of Windows the 32-bit version of the app must be installed, as the Shorten codec does not come in a 64-bit variant. To install the 32-bit version on a 64-bit system, hold-down the right shift key and double-click the installer; keep it held-down until the installer is on-screen.

Converting on macOS

X Lossless Decoder (XLD), an open source graphical and command line application powered by the libsndfile and SoX libraries, supports transcoding Shorten files to a variety of lossless and lossy formats.

is also available and can be interfaced with through the terminal identically to how it is used on Linux

References

External links

Shorten Research Paper
written by the author of Shorten and detailing how it works.
Trader's Little Helper Download page
Trader's Little helper converts shn to wav among other things
etree.org Wiki article

etree.org
is a trading site for authorized recordings of live performances; etree formerly used Shorten exclusively but is increasingly using

.
Shorten FAQ
(note: If looking for software to play .shn files, you will probably be better served by th
etree software page
as the Shorten FAQ has many broken and outdated links.)

a performance comparison of lossless audio formats, including Shorten.

Includes a decent list of programs to handle Shorten files. {{Compression formats Lossless audio codecs Cross-platform software