[Slowhand] recent MP3 discussions

[Roy D. Houston]

Hello all,

With the recent discussion regarding hosting an MP3 site (thank you to whoever has offered the space to host) - may I make a suggestion....

Why not use Shorten (.shn) files rather than MP3s?  .SHN files are "lossless" - meaning that they use a compression scheme that does not remove content/data from the original .Wav files.  .SHNs can be decoded very easily using the mkw freeware to convert them to their original .Wav files.  Many other lists are moving to this type of technology to populate complete shows without any loss of quality (and many traders are adopting .SHN files as the burn method of choice - sending .SHNs instead of Audio Cds.  It reduces the number of discs sent out and can be easily encoded back to a standard CD disc).  The .SHN files are typically prepared with a checksum file (.MD5) that you can use to verify that your downloaded .SHNs have arrived to your PC without corruption.

The only drawback that comes with lossless compression is that the file sizes are larger than MP3s - about half the size of the .WAV whereas MP3s are roughly one tenth the size.

Any thoughts?

-Roy