What is a .SHN file?
SHN is a Shorten file - an early lossless audio compressor once popular for sharing live concert recordings. Created by SoftSound.
- Did you know
- Before FLAC, Shorten was the format of choice on live-music trading sites because it was lossless and a recording could be verified byte for byte.
- Shorten was written by Tony Robinson at SoftSound in the 1990s and works only on 8- or 16-bit PCM, with no support for today's higher bit depths.
- Live-recording communities paired SHN with companion checksum files to prove a download matched the original transfer byte for byte.
- What Analyser reads
- Identify many more audio formats: lossless/hi-res codecs (Monkey’s Audio, WavPack, TAK, True Audio, DSD/SACD, Musepack), pro containers (Core Audio, RF64/BW64, Wave64, Sun AU, Broadcast Wave with timecode), speech/mobile (Speex, AMR-WB, QCP, 3GA, M4R, GSM), MPEG Layer I/II, instrument banks (SoundFont, SFZ, DLS, RIFF MIDI, GigaStudio), ringtones (RTTTL, iMelody, SAP), tracker modules (MOD, XM, IT, S3M, OctaMED, 669, Oktalyzer), chiptunes (NES NSF, SNES SPC, VGM, Game Boy GBS, AY, YM) and Audacity projects. DJI waveform peak sidecars (PKF - the overview a DJI recorder writes beside its audio) are drawn as a waveform; Adobe Audition peak caches (also PKF) are identified.
- Depth of analysis
- .SHN is an identification-grade format: Analyser recognises it from its bytes and decodes the header metadata it carries, rather than opening it in a full viewer. Formats that do get a full viewer are marked "Full" on the formats page.
- Open a .SHN file
- Drag a .SHN file onto the Analyser home page (or tap to pick one). It is identified entirely in your browser - nothing is uploaded, there is no account, and it works offline once installed.