i just downloaded a few oar shows and they are in Shorten format. I have a mac, and although there are some third party programs that can play .shn files, the native program iTunes cannot. If i convert these to .wav, will this be a lossless conversion? i know i'll have extremely high file sizes, but i have a 200 gb hd, so space isn't really a factor. I'm just concerned if it will be lossless (i'm pretty sure it will be, but i wanted to be completely sure before doing so)

Thanks

SHN to WAV is lossless.

SHN is a lossless codec so both SHN to WAV and WAV to SHN are lossless procedures. With a lossy codec, MP3 for example, MP3 to WAV is lossless but WAV to MP3 is most decidedly not lossless (lossy).

Lossless Codecs (to name a few):
Shorten (SHN)
Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC)
Monkey's Audio (APE)
OptimFrog (OFR)
Lossless Audio (LA)
Wavpack (WV)

Lossy Codec (to name a few):
MPEG Layer 3 (MP3)
Ogg Vorbis (Ogg)
Advanced Audio Coding (AAC)
MPEG-4 Advanced Audio Coding (MP4 or M4A)
Musepack (MPC)

The filesizes of the WAVs should not be extremely huge in comparison to the SHN files as SHN usually has a fairly poor compression ratio.