So I did a quick search on the stickied post but didn't see anyone mention any programs they might be using on a Vista OS to convert shn files. It seems that MkW is not Vista compatible so I'm needing something to replace it. Any suggestions?

1) google "shn vista"
2) click first result
3) find link to this http://tlh.easytree.org/

Enjoy.

Many thanks; I kept googling "shn" only, and for whatever reason it didn't dawn on me to google "shn Vista". Thanks again

while we're at it, (not knocking you Ampson, just asking in general) why do people still use SHN? isn't FLAC much more compatible with players and whatnot? + i believe it can compress even "deeper" than shn without losing quality.

Cono I'll give you my reason, and I'm curious whether the more tech savvy members of the board will think I'm a complete luddite for my answer. The only reason that I need an shn converter, along with FlacFrontend, is that everything that I download in a lossless format, I immediately convert to wav files, dump into I-tunes and then burn to CD. I like to be able to physically take a CD and stick it in my home CD player or Car CD player to listen to it. And I know that its converting it to a lossy format, but when I was growing up pretty much the only way I could get my hands on any kind of bootlegged shows was to pay $40 for a questionable CD at an independent record store. So now that I can go on Etree and dl a show that was played yesterday, and know that the recording is going to be pretty awesome, I'm just stoked that its that easy. So in other words my answer is that I need an shn converter because I'm old

I think he was asking about people converting INTO shn.

only reason I have an shn converter is like you to decode stuff I downloaded.
I hate shn, no tags, and can't just put it on my player either, or straight into a burner software, so you have to go through the Wav.

yeah sorry if that wasn't clear. i meant why do people still rip or convert albums to SHN?

I've had a lot of experience in the past few months looking for vista-compatible software and fixes.

Flac does compress somewhat more efficiently than shn. Like 15% better or something around there on average. It's also significantly faster, from my experience, both to zip and to rip.

Did anyone ever use .ape (Monkey's Audio) format for compression? Before FLAC became widely accepted, ape was one of the first compression formats that was superior to shn in speed and compression ratio. It's been pretty much obsolete for about five years now, but I bet I still have some stuff in ape format somewhere.