What does this shntool output mean?

[lucasweb]

Okay so i know that the "-b-" under cdr means that there is an SBE on that track and i know how to easily fix it but i've never seen "h-" show up under WAVE, so can you guys help me out and tell me what that means and is there a way to fix it with a mac? thanks for any and all help

[jazzbo]

Originally Posted by lucasweb

Okay so i know that the "-b-" under cdr means that there is an SBE on that track and i know how to easily fix it but i've never seen "h-" show up under WAVE, so can you guys help me out and tell me what that means and is there a way to fix it with a mac? thanks for any and all help

The 'h' means that the compressed wav files have non-canonical headers, which shouldn't affect the audio or the fingerprint of the audio data. Some software along the way added some tags or other extraneous information to the headers. You can use shntool's strip command to fix the headers, or if you convert from shn to flac, I believe flac will fix it automatically.

[Five]

WAVE Shows properties of the WAVE data. An 'h' in the first slot
indicates that the WAVE [h]eader is not canonical. An 'e' in
the second slot indicates that the WAVE file contains [e]xtra
RIFF chunks.

http://www.etree.org/shnutils/shntool/doc/README.txt

this means there's something which is not audio included with the WAV file (99% probably: USELESS!). If/when these files are ever converted to FLAC this non-audio data will be stripped off permanently & automatically. There's a way to get SHNtool remove this as well.

Once this data is gone, the wholefile .md5 for the SHN set will never again work for Led Zeppelin 4-9-70 d1t05.shn and Led Zeppelin 4-9-70 d2t01.shn

This is why the SHNtool md5 (.st5) is better, because it ignores any data which is not audio and also generates the same fingerprint for any format.

IMO you should make a secure conversion to FLAC (audio data bit-verified identical), then fix the SBE using SHNtool (or a SHNtool frontend, it looks like you've got something already installed) then do another len check at the end. Keep a backup of the original files until you're finished & positive everything is okay..

[lucasweb]

Thanks for the info guys, i was planning on converting to flac and i was just wondering about fixing that since i was going to fix the SBE. Thanks for help, i'll spread the knowledge if this comes up in the future

[RainDawg]

Just some extra insight here...I've seen that "h" appear as the result of using cue-points in Cool Edit. Many wav editing programs add some kind of non-audio data into the header that they use. It's possible that these files have been edited in some way. Either way, that data is really useless to you now, and you can disard it without affecting the audio of the file.

Yes, FLAC will automatically delete that information, and if you use FLAC frontend, the cmd window that pops up will actually give you some feedback that it's removing additional header data when it encodes the file.

Edit to add: I see you're on a Mac, so you may not get feedback when converting to FLAC on your system, but guaranteed that just doing the FLAC conversion will remove that 'h' from the file.

[lucasweb]

Converting to flac (after fixing the sbe and i also changed the file names) got rid of that h, and like you guessed while converting i didn't get any feedback about removing header data. Also while doing this i found out that xACT (1.4d19) does straight conversions from SHN->FLAC without needing to convert to wav, so if mac users ask in the future xACT now has the option to do that

[U2Lynne]

Originally Posted by lucasweb

Also while doing this i found out that xACT (1.4d19) does straight conversions from SHN->FLAC without needing to convert to wav, so if mac users ask in the future xACT now has the option to do that

That's good to know. I guess I need to download the latest since I'm still using 1.4d16.

[lucasweb]

I wouldn't trash that old copy of xACT yet though, i have to use two copies of it because the newest one i'm using can't seem to generate a fingerprint correctly and when fixing SBE"s it requires two songs to be corrected. I use the new version only for SHN->FLAC conversions and the SBE fix actually outputs to flac now instead of in the past having to use the SBE fix and output to wav and then convert flac which was a pain

[Five]

Originally Posted by lucasweb

...and when fixing SBE"s it requires two songs to be corrected.

Yeah, I've been having this same problem with SHNtool from the cmd.exe to BatchEnc to Trader's Little Helper. If I just want to fix an SBE on the last track (add padding) it says it requires two songs to run.

Originally Posted by Five

Yeah, I've been having this same problem with SHNtool from the cmd.exe to BatchEnc to Trader's Little Helper. If I just want to fix an SBE on the last track (add padding) it says it requires two songs to run.

Five old man, it's been discussed repeatedly in here that shntool's fix mode can't be used on just one track. If you want to just add padding to the last track use pad mode, like this:

shntool pad -postpad -o flac [filename]

[Five]

thanks so much, uhclem. your knowledge never ceases to amaze me.