iTunes: Download, Convert and Import Shorten (.shn) Audio Files
by Scott Chitwood, March 29th, 2005

The Live Music Archive at archive.org is the repository for a wealth of trade-friendly, artist endorsed, live performance, one hundred percent legal music downloads. Here's a few words quoted directly from the site...

The Live Music Archive is a community committed to providing the highest quality live concerts in a lossless, downloadable format. All music in this Collection is from trade-friendly artists and is strictly noncommercial, both for access here and for any further distribution.

I stumbled upon the intital link (for Grateful Dead music) while reading a forum thread at MacAddict. The page has links for hundreds of shows from 1965 - 1995, that's a lot more than this old boy could ever hope to sift through. On a whim I did a search for a Kansas City band, The Rainmakers, that I was a big fan of in the late 1980s and was rewarded with links to several live recordings of their shows.

A good portion of the files hosted at the Live Music Archive are in the Shorten (.shn) format. Shorten is an audio compression scheme that can compact wav files without subtracting out any frequencies. It's "lossless"- everything in the original wav is there, so that full quality is maintained. More info regarding the Shorten format can be found here.

Downloading, importing and converting Shorten files is a multi-part process. You'll need a copy of Shorten for Macintosh to make the conversion from (.shn) to (.wav).

First thing to do is grab some shorten files. The Rainmakers have two excellent selections from their April 10th, 1998 show; "Let My People Go-Go" (rainmakers1998-04-10d1t02.shn) and "Long Gone Long" (rainmakers1998-04-10d1t09.shn). But you don't have to take my word for it, feel free to browse for the band of your liking! Dial-up users beware — these are huge files, well over 30MB.

If you'd like to listen to Shorten files without converting them to another format you can do so using MacAmp Lite X, a defunct iTunes competitor. MacAmp Lite X can be downloaded from the artic lounge, a screenshot of the original developer's website with registration codes can be found on the same page.

Converting the Shorten file, using Shorten for Macintosh, to a format (.wav) that iTunes can recognize is easy as drag and drop.







Now we need to import the (.wav) into iTunes — again, drag and drop is our best friend. Due to the file size, a whopping 56.5MB, we don't want to keep the (.wav) file. Control Click or Right Click on the file in iTunes, the contextual menu will have a selection for converting the file to the default format you've specified in the Importing Prefs. Note: this process creates a second file of the same name rather than overwriting the existing file.





Once your music file has been coverted delete the (.wav) file from iTunes. That's it! Deciding what songs to download is your problem :)