Adventures in Switching to Linux

Many months ago I downloaded some Jump Little Children live shows from the Internet Archive Live Music Archive. The files, of course, were in a lossless format but it was the older Shorten (*.shn) format instead of the newer and open FLAC. Shorten has limited support in Linux (and Windows too) so instead of trying to play them as shn I decided to convert them to mp3.

Tappers: I know you hate when your lossless recordings are converted to mp3. Heck, the notes that come with the files explicitly say "DO NOT ENCODE INTO MP3!" I am going to do it anyway. I would go with FLAC since it is also lossless, creates smaller files than Shorten and is better supported but I still have problems with FLAC. First, it is still much larger than an mp3 and my hearing and/or audio systems are not good enough for it to matter to me. Second, FLAC does not play on my iPod so I would have to convert it to something else to listen to it there. I promise though that I will not distribute these crappy mp3 copies of your recording and I plan to keep a copy of the shn files around (or maybe a FLAC copy as an archive). Thanks and keep up the good work!

I first installed the shntool package using Synaptic. This page showed me the command line arguments. But that didn't work as planned.

$ shntool conv -o wav *.shn
shntool [conv]: warning: failed to read data from input file using format: [shn]
shntool [conv]:          + you may not have permission to read file: [jlc2003-02-14d1t01.shn]
shntool [conv]:          + arguments may be incorrect for decoder: [shorten]
shntool [conv]:          + verify that the decoder is installed and in your PATH
shntool [conv]:          + this file may be unsupported, truncated or corrupt

I needed to download the Shorten codec too (shorten-3.6.1.tar.gz)... but would not compile because the C compiler cannot create executables. Fixing that was a simple:

$ sudo apt-get install libc6-dev g++ gcc

Then I was back to compiling and installing with:

$ ./configure
$ make
$ make check
$ sudo make install

And now I can convert the Shorten files to wav files (or FLAC but that takes more processing and I want to go to mp3 eventually so instead of going Shorten -> FLAC -> WAV -> mp3 I decided to just go Shorten -> WAV -> mp3. I did convert a few to FLAC which worked well. (To do FLAC, use shntool conv -o flac *.shn, wav is the default as you see below.)

$ shntool conv *.shn
Converting [jlc2003-02-14d1t01.shn] (0:35.65) --> [jlc2003-02-14d1t01.wav] : 100% OK
Converting [jlc2003-02-14d1t02.shn] (5:18.22) --> [jlc2003-02-14d1t02.wav] : 100% OK
...

To then convert your wav files to mp3 I would suggest lame (LAME Ain't an Mp3 Encoder). What else is there anyway?

$ sudo apt-get install lame

lame does not support batch processing thought like shntool did so I found a good FLAC to mp3 post that helped me write this little gem:

$ for file in *.wav; do $(lame -V2 "$file" "${file%.wav}.mp3"); done

using the -V2 option will encode the mp3s with variable bit rate at a fairly high quality (4 is default with a range of 0 to 10 and 0 being the best quality)

Now instead of the about 1.2GB of shn files, I have 272MB of mp3s to listen to most anywhere.

One final resource I found helpful was the shn in Ubuntu thread. Enjoy your music.