SHN or FLAC??

[ChrisF]

Originally posted by Captain Video

In reference to doing both, I was thinking more of distribution, not archiving.  Chris could do flac for those who want it in that format and the shns that you guys have been making would work for the rest.

Its kind of dumb to have the same show in SHN and FLAC. And Matt or Dave could just as easily encode FLACs as i could.

I was just on the SHNapster hub seaching for random 2003 stuff like the dead, phish, widespread panic, bonnaroo 2003, ect and about 25-30% of the files that came up were FLAC. WSP was actually mostly ass FLAC.  Thats not bad considering that SHN has been the only format used for trading shows online for about 4 or 5 years until recently. If even more people switched over then everyone eventually would.  

There are no aspects that make SHN better than FLAC, but there are several that make FLAC better than SHN. Its maily the smaller size that i like and being able to fit some shows that would fit on 2 shn discs on one flac disc. That is very important when your collection of live music is practically a fire hazard.  It is also very convienient with the plug in for Nero, so i can burn an audio cd from flac files without needing to decompress them to wav first. That comes in handy when i have 40 gigs of shows that are mostly flacs that are not yet burned. Its saves many hours and makes it so i can burn about 20 gigs or more in one sitting. That only happened twice, but i know i would not get as backed up as i have in the past with my SHNs since i always archived them on data discs and then burned audio as well.

The Kenwood Music Keg supports FLAC, so you can listen to FLACs and all the popular lossy formats like mp3, wma, and ogg vorbis in the car. The new RIO Karma mp3 player now supports FLAC and Ogg Vorbis formats along with mp3 and any other formats that might have been supported in previous players.  Before Rio came out with their original mp3 players no one even listened to mp3s in any other way than on the computer. Now portable mp3 players have replaced portable cassette players, and all of the new portable cd players support mp3 CD-Rs except for the cheap store brand ones you can find in stores like wal-mart.

 its only a matter of time before more companies start supporting flac and we will only have to burn flac discs instead of both flac and audio. that means we will use about 60% less CD-Rs, so buying a CD player that supports FLAC will pay for itself if you do a lot of trading.

[ChrisF]

Originally posted by Captain Video
Just out of curiousity, how hard is it to go from flac to shn and vice versa?

It is no harder to encode FLACs than it is to encode SHNs, so that is not even an issue.

Originally posted by Captain Video

It seems that more people are doing shn right now, so at leadt for the time being it makes sense to use it as that will get better distribution on the shows.  

I think anyone who uses SHN is computer literate enough to make the switch.  (Its not really even a switch unless you are a taper. If you trade often you will be dealing with both formats from now on) Anyone who wants the show will not care if it is in FLAC or SHN just as long as they get it. Pretty much everyone who trades online must have come into contact with FLACs at one point or another. About half of the dead shows i have downloaded from this summer were FLAC and LivePhish switched to FLAC. FLAC is already very popular, its not like APE was. I am sure there are some people who are ignorant and dont download a great show only because its in FLAC instead of SHN, but there are also people who say "wow this show is in FLAC. I am going to download this one first," so that pretty much balances everything out as far as distribution goes.

[kindm's]

I made the switch to flac and have not looked back. In my experience I find the encoding of the flac takes a little bit longer than SHN when I am on the highest compression schemes. I like it for several reasons. It is much harder for people to fuck up the MD5 files because they are embedded in the file. They can be played back in winamp and scrolled through without adding any additional files (.skt that needs to be in SHN) AND most importantly flac supports 24/XX wav files. I record every PB show I go to in at least 24/48. I don\'t trade them simply because no one has asked me for them. Most of us tapers / Audiophiles will eventually have a soundcard that supports 24/XXX playback. flac allows me to archive not only the CD quality but also the original 24 Bit file (although the compression is minimal at best).


I vote FLAC. Also with the amount of Bit Torrent trading that goes on here it just speeds things up. I am only seeding in flac. If people want to encode the original flac files to shn then fine but I will only be using flac until something better comes along.

There are 2 (at the very least) active laptop tapers in this community so the higher Bit rate support must be taken in to consideration in my opinion.

Smaller files size = easier Archiving (in digital relm), quicker distribution of files (BT) and possible less physical CD-r\'s than SHN.

[davepeck]

Originally posted by kindm\'s
I made the switch to flac and have not looked back.

mike, you should head over to the GROUP FREESTYLE FLOW thread with that one.

in all seriousness, you\'ve all mentioned some very good points. mike hit the nail right on the head with the advantages of embedded signature files, and the fact that they\'re automatically seekable.. i\'ve downloaded a LOT of shows in shn lately that haven\'t been seekable, and that\'s definitely annoying..

has there been an explorer shell implementation of flac yet? one thing i love about shn (mkw) is the fact that you can do anything you need with shn/wav just by right-clicking on the file in explorer...

[ChrisF]

Originally posted by davepeck


has there been an explorer shell implementation of flac yet? one thing i love about shn (mkw) is the fact that you can do anything you need with shn/wav just by right-clicking on the file in explorer...

If there is it is on this page http://flac.sourceforge.net/download.html

I dont know about the other programs listed but I think the dBpowerAMP Music Converter adds right clicking for various formats. I had it before i last reformatted my hard drive. I think i uninstalled it because you need the Power Pack for it to support SHN too, but its shareware so you have to pay for it to get the full version.

[Captain Video]

Thanks to all for helping to bring me up to speed on the flac topic, it is fairly new to me, and I do not know anyone other than you guys who are using it....as a fellow addict with a fire hazard masqerading as a CD collection, a disc here and a disc there less than what I had before really adds up, not only in space, but $$$.  Anybody out there using the Mac version?  You all are making flac sound so good that I want to upgrade computers now and start flac, not to mention the fact that BT is also available for OSX.  This gets better all the time!!  Kev

[crimsonknuckles]

i never tried flac. alot of my pb shows have  digital farts or weird sounds(static). do other people have these problems? maybe because i have to transfer shn to wave?

[crimsonknuckles]

by the way i hate being called a newbie. it,s been three years of dedication!!!!

[ChrisF]

Originally posted by crimsonknuckles
i never tried flac. alot of my pb shows have  digital farts or weird sounds(static). do other people have these problems? maybe because i have to transfer shn to wave?

Everyone has to go from shn > wav to burn audio discs, thats the only way to do it. do you hear static when you listen to the files on the computer, or just on audio discs that you burn? either you have just had bad luck and are picking shows with errors or you are doing something stupid thats causing bad burns.