TLH help ... shn > flac ... file disappears

[roann]

*** Always post questions/comments/suggestions/issues/bugs about TLH in the Trader's Little Helper thread (located at the top of Technobabble). This way I will be automatically notified when there are new posts related to TLH. ***

Now to the conversion failure. My explanations below are ultimately guesses. I could do an exact error analysis only if you would send me one of the .shn files in question by e-mail. If it's a TLH bug it would help me to iron it out.

Shorten is one of the oldest lossless audio codecs (created in 1993, final maintenance release in 2007). Now considered a legacy codec, it lacks most features of modern codecs, like tagging, for example. But even then there were programmers who did not fully adhere to the codec specifications. They wrote programs for converting WAVE to Shorten format that could "squeeze" at least some metadata into a .shn file. However, adding metadata to a .shn file can “confuse” the Shorten to FLAC conversion process. TLH does not do the conversion itself, but uses a program called shntool (not written by me). It is therefore possible that shntool "chokes" on the unexpected metadata.

You wrote in one of your posts that the target directory is read-only. This means that Windows OS cannot write any files to such a directory. If you let TLH encode files to a read-only folder the FLAC encoder will detect the write lock and delete everything.

Robert