I have rather a number of shorten files from various show trading sites, and I don't seem to be able to find any utilities for tagging them (or even players that read the tags). If I recall correctly Shorten uses its own tagging format, and while gstreamer will play them back, it won't read any tags. EasyTAG won't tag them, either, so I'm left with hundreds of files that won't sort in Rhythmbox. It's not unfeasible to convert them all to FLAC, but I'd really rather not...

So if anyone knows of such programs/plugins I'd be happy

I don't think shorten supports tagging at all. The most common solution i think is to store the tags in external files, just like what used to be done with seektables, and that method also has the advantage of not messing up the md5 checksums. I have no idea what software to use for that though.

I thought foobar2000 tagged them without external files though..?

Why don't you convert them to FLAC for example. Or other modern lossless format. FLAC is better I think, because I guess it is possibly the 2nd most accepted format in trading circles. Nice FLAC feature that it already has a MD5 checksum over the music content, so there is no real need for checksumming either.

Triza

I tried tagging an shn file with foobar2000 and I got an external tag file. Apparently that is what you get if you enable "Write tags to disk" under preferences>playback>input>Shorten.

No, foo_shn/foo_input_shorten always uses external files for tags.

If there's no easy way of reading Shorten tags then I'll do just that - I do have much more FLAC than Shorten and obviously there are lots of advantages, it's just a bit easier not to run a mass conversion on hundreds of files . Thanks to everyone for the information, I don't know how I didn't notice all the .tag files; I thought that some modification to Shorten allowed storing of tags within the same file but I guess I was wrong.