Burning Lossless Files to CD-A; Why the f@$k do SHNs take so damn long?

I've looked and looked, but for the life of me, I can't figure out why it takes so much longer to burn SHN files as opposed to FLAC - Like, DRASTICALLY longer (5 min. FLACs vs. 30 min. SHN)

It's to the point that I don't enjoy alot of SHN shows that I've downloaded because I don't want to sit around all morning waiting for the damn thing to burn off!

For the record, I'm running WinXP SP2, Nero w/ SHN & FLAC plugins for burning..

[iamhydrogen]

yeah, that shn plug in for nero sucks. just extract the shns to wavs and burn them. it is a hell of alot quicker. that's what i do.

[iamhydrogen]

oh, by the way if you are using mkwact to extract the shns make sure to go to the options and turn of "delete input files after processing" so as to not alter the original file set.

Wouldn't decoding take just as long? I ask these being completely uneducated about it, the extent of my encoding experience was mp3 > cda back in the days when none of the burning software out there supported on the fly conversion.....

Seriously, wouldn't just THIS be enough to convince the SHN folks that their closed source format is dead? I'd take FLAC over SHN any day of the week - moreover, if I had the time and knowledge, I'd spend my days converting every SHN set I have to FLAC and redistributing..!

[tgc225]

The SHN format actually decodes faster than FLAC in most tests:

http://flac.sourceforge.net/comparison.html

Decode as in SHN > WAV? Sure, but there will never be any sort of situation where I would want to convert ANY file to WAV - I'm only intersted in > CD-A conversion (which I suppose, is just a WAV, but if that's the case, I still don't get why it takes longer to do SHN > CD-A vs. FLAC > CD-A, if SHN is supposed to be faster...

[dorrcoq]

Originally Posted by rabble

Seriously, wouldn't just THIS be enough to convince the SHN folks that their closed source format is dead? I'd take FLAC over SHN any day of the week - moreover, if I had the time and knowledge, I'd spend my days converting every SHN set I have to FLAC and redistributing..!

Read Five's foobar2000 tutorial - it is simple to convert from SHN to FLAC. Not necessarily a speedy conversion, but really easy to do.

[pmonk]

Why not use shntool - Doesn't seem like a long process to me???

[geordy]

Originally Posted by rabble

Decode as in SHN > WAV? Sure, but there will never be any sort of situation where I would want to convert ANY file to WAV - I'm only intersted in > CD-A conversion (which I suppose, is just a WAV, but if that's the case, I still don't get why it takes longer to do SHN > CD-A vs. FLAC > CD-A, if SHN is supposed to be faster...

Your problem is that you're letting Nero do the converting while trying to burn the cd. It's trying to do two processor intensive jobs at the same time. To save yourself some time, use an external program to convert shn>wav, then burn the wav files to CD-A. After you burn the cd, delete the wav files and keep the shn files to make future CD-A's from.

SHN>WAV is slightly faster than FLAC>WAV, using programs other than Nero to do the conversions. My computer has lots of trouble doing SHN > CD-A or FLAC > CD-A, so I just don't do it. If you're sick of shn files, just convert SHN>WAV>FLAC.

Originally Posted by geordy

Your problem is that you're letting Nero do the converting while trying to burn the cd. It's trying to do two processor intensive jobs at the same time. To save yourself some time, use an external program to convert shn>wav, then burn the wav files to CD-A. After you burn the cd, delete the wav files and keep the shn files to make future CD-A's from.

SHN>WAV is slightly faster than FLAC>WAV, using programs other than Nero to do the conversions. My computer has lots of trouble doing SHN > CD-A or FLAC > CD-A, so I just don't do it. If you're sick of shn files, just convert SHN>WAV>FLAC.

What would you folks suggest for a good SHN > WAV conversion app?

[pmonk]

I will say it again - shntool works fine in my book!

[TheMamba]

Originally Posted by New Homebrew

That was fucking great!

Originally Posted by rabble

What would you folks suggest for a good SHN > WAV conversion app?

etree scripts

They're command line, but it's a simple matter of pointing the command at the folder containing your shows. On my system, the command would look something like the following:

unshn /home/sarah/Music/lossless_shows/nameofshowfolder

However, the 'flacify' command is even sweeter--takes any lossless format you have decoders on your system for, and spits out sector-boundary aligned flac files.

I love the etree scripts because they don't require navigating into the actual directory, so they take one less command than using shntool or a conventional command line encoder.