Quoting Michael Peters <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > On Fri, 11 Mar 2005 17:35:54 -0800, Phil Karn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > > Shorten still seems to be popular on bt.etree.org and other sites where > > audience recordings of taper-friendly bands are traded. I can't figure > > out why, as flac seems to be superior to shorten in every way. FLAC > > files are about 5% smaller, and they support metatags. > > It's mostly habit - these people have been using shorten for eons and > have scripts that automate their process etc. > > When I get such files I transcode to flac for my own purposes.
The nasty problem with shorten is that the format is not very well documented. The most common procedure for getting information about a shorten file is to run the decompression piped to /dev/null and read the wav headers. Thus, slimserver is actually starting a decode on every shorten file in order to grab the info needed to put the file in the DB. There are a lot of shorten files that seem to not comply with this and end up being zero duration (thus skipped in playback). to make things worse, systems like windows dont like /dev/null so the server spits out a warning for every shorten file it finds and never adds them to the db properly. I have only about 10 shorten files. Only 2 are playable with slimserver. I have tried to find alternative ways of getting the info, but I give up after losing too many evenings. tips would be useful. -kdf _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
