1. Flac compresses better. It isn't as small is the lossy mp3's the greater population of the world chooses to trade, but it generally saves about 50 MB per 800MB .shn show. I have had a few shows that lost 100 MB of space when encoding .shn > .flac.
2. .flacs are always seekable. Sweet. Very handy when you get those "What hte F@$& was THAT!?!?!" moments when you're listening to a show, then you realize that on some shns, you can't seek.
3. Fingerprinting. This is an internal md5 of the .wav file that is embedded within the .flac. These are great for tracking seeds, and can be found in all of the .txt files that I have on my server. I'm all about the fingerprinting because I don't have to worry about the fingerprint changing if I want to tag the file or make it seekable (but seekability isn't a problem for flac....see above), both things you can't really do with shn without changing the md5's (and there is nothing worse than listening to show, hearing a pop, and trying to backtrack to see if you were just being crazy but you *can't* cause the .shn isn't seekable!...again, see rant above.)
4. Tagging. Having the fingerprint only code for the .wav file allows us to tag our .flacs without changing the ffp. So you can tag your files however you want and not have to worry about crapping up the fingerprints. I use tagging to put all necessary info into a .flac: band, date/venue/city/state, and source. This way, if something happens to the txt. file, you still know the source of your show. See above statement. Get down with the metadata.
5. Test function. This is great because it's independent of the .ffp. All it does is verify the integrity of your files by dragging and dropping them into the frontend and hitting the test button. If it doesn't check, try redownloading cause that is always the problem. See next statement for why.
6. File verification while encoding. This rocks cause you never ever have to worry about a corrupt file when you encode, everything is verified for you. All you gotta do is check the box. Easy as pie.
7. NO NEED FOR MD5'S. You have the test function to test your flacs and the ffp to track your seeds. having an md5 file would mess everything up (not to mention completely redundant). Just remeber, everytime you change a tag, the EXTERNAL md5 (which shorten/mkw checks) changes. So everytime you change your tag you would have to change your md5. And since that is a major asspain (not to mention totally unneccesary) you just don't do it. It's the same concept as somebody seeding a torrent then changing the txt file. If they don't send out a new torrent, everyone stalls at 99.9% because the seeder decided to change the txt file and now the hash won't check. Same difference. (There was a discussion on archive on how md5's are good for uploading to LMA, and I recommended doing so just because it's easier for those on LMA to check the shows. However, you still won't be seeing them here. sorry.)
8. Aligning on sector boundries. This is one of the biggest reasons I use flac. I don't have to worry about a taper/transferrer forgetting to check their .shn seeds with shntool after they track the show. Of course, we here at etree would expect that all shows would be SBE free with no extra header chunks and all that jazz, but that never happens. At least with flac, while encoding a show, you can align all your sectors and eliminate any SBE's (that is, if the encoder remembers to check that cute little box which reads 'align on sector boundries'). Of course, if people set their programs to cut tracks on sector boundries, we wouldn't have that problem, now whould we? (/end rant) However, all shows that come through me are verified via shntool, because I have seen people seed shows in .flac and still have massive sbe problems (like this killer Kottke show....it'll be fixed when my hd gets fixed).
9. Did I forget to mention that .flac gets rid of all unneccesary header data?
10. Also, a great one. Flac supports 24 bit files, as opposed to shn, which is only 16. You should hear the difference. I'll be putting up a test file with ph2003-02-18 soon. 24s are GREAT for archiving.

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Last Updated Saturday, 26 February, 2005