what is the easiest way...

[easts_vault]

to convert all my shns to flac files?

[tet]

if you are on a Windows PC, you can use a program called dbpoweramp to do this.  it allows for direct conversion between all various kinds of audio files.

if on a Mac, you could make the SHNs into WAV or AIFF files using xACT, then re-encode them to whatever format you want.

however, i think i should note that this should be done strictly for personal reasons, not for purposes of re-sharing.  while i and many others would prefer everything being in a superior file format such as FLAC, there are others who do not feel that it is a good use of resources.  to each his own.  there have been lengthy, often nasty debates over this, so if you want more insight as to that, do a search on these forums. 

[easts_vault]

if you are on a Windows PC, you can use a program called dbpoweramp to do this.  it allows for direct conversion between all various kinds of audio files.

if on a Mac, you could make the SHNs into WAV or AIFF files using xACT, then re-encode them to whatever format you want.

however, i think i should note that this should be done strictly for personal reasons, not for purposes of re-sharing.  while i and many others would prefer everything being in a superior file format such as FLAC, there are others who do not feel that it is a good use of resources.  to each his own.  there have been lengthy, often nasty debates over this, so if you want more insight as to that, do a search on these forums. 

yup. It will only be for my own "vault". Now at work I use a mac(kick ass dual quad core) and use xact, which today I drug in a shn file and encoded it directly to flac, no aiff middle man involved. Decoded the new flac to aiff and it sounded/worked fine, have you or anyone else tried this? At home I am on a PC and I use dbpoweramp, I like the batch feature. I just didn't now if decoding to wav/aiff then back to flac if there was any file degredation.

[tet]

hmm, i've never tried that on xAct.  gonna have to give that a shot and see if there's any sound loss...  i know the developer too, i can ask him if it's supposed to work like that.

[rowjimmy]

Foobar will convert too (for pc people.)

[jephrey]

I've used xACT for tons of encoding/decoding.  I stopped going to aiff but I think it was something in iTunes that gave me something weird.  If I need to edit, I go to WAV.  I don't imagine and haven't seen issue going straight from shn to flac or to any other lossless format any number of times since those issues that cropped up a couple years ago...  I've checked it out for a couple encode-decode cycles and everything is the same as the original.  Nothing is lost on any lossless conversion as far as I have been able to tell.

[DoW]

however, i think i should note that this should be done strictly for personal reasons, not for purposes of re-sharing.  while i and many others would prefer everything being in a superior file format such as FLAC, there are others who do not feel that it is a good use of resources.  to each his own.  there have been lengthy, often nasty debates over this, so if you want more insight as to that, do a search on these forums. 

thank you for posting that even if your view is differing.  I won't get into that debate.

I don't do the whole conversion and I won't get into that, but I thought I would ask the question that i don't know the answer to.

is the proper conversion shn>wav>flac as opposed to shn>flac?
I know they are all lossless but I do think the checksums may differ on those two methods.

[mattstick]

It's easy enough to test.

Take a WAV file, create an MD5 of it.

Convert said WAV file to FLAC, then convert that FLAC to SHN, decode that SHN to WAV and test it's MD5.

[rowjimmy]

They will be the same.

SHN > FLAC is secretly SHN > WAV > FLAC.