SHNTool, long favored by the music-trading community as a fast, efficient utility for lossless transcoding, has in the past been primarily seen as a way to manipulate "Shorten" audio files... but is now much more. In version 1.2.0 (stable) released today, this program adds the ability to join/split/convert audio from a number of different formats. Currently supported are:

WAV (native support)
AIFF via SOX 12.17.3 (built under Cygwin; modified to work with shntool)
APE via Monkey's Audio 3.97 (modified to work with shntool)
FLAC via FLAC 1.0.4 (standard version)
PAC via LPAC 1.40 / 3.08 (standard version)
OFR via OptimFROG 4.21 (standard version)
SHN via Shorten 3.5.0 (new version, released November 18)

Unfortunately, there is still no support for David Bryant's WavPack (although support may be forthcoming, according to this thread), or for RKAU.

- M.

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More from the changelog:

version 1.2.0 (2002-12-07)
+ info mode now supports extra per-format information (currently this is used
to indicate seekability of shn files)
+ join mode now supports joining of non-CD quality files

version 1.2.0-rc2 (2002-10-31)
+ overall compression ratio shown in len mode if all input files are compressed
+ fixed bug in fix mode that caused shntool to hang in rare instances
+ added support for ofr (OptimFROG) and lpac file formats

version 1.2.0-rc1 (2002-09-12)
+ added support for aiff, flac and ape file formats; dropped kexis support
(aiff format supports only AIFF and uncompressed AIFF-C, not compressed AIFF-C)
+ added new mode 'conv' (converts files from one format to another)
+ improved functionality in cmp mode (new -s, -l and -f options)
+ join mode can now write to stdout (only with 'wav' output format)
+ shntool now waits for child processes (prevents shorten 3.4/md5sum race condition)
+ fixed bug in join mode that caused output file to have incorrect data size
when the data was not sector-aligned, and -nopad was specified
+ some debugging output now shown if SHNTOOL_DEBUG environment variable is set
(currently limited to the status of child processes - useful if shntool is hanging)
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cool.... but is there a gui for it?

No GUI... sorry. Most folks using SHNTool set up batch files and associate them with right-click functionality (which is what I do, and why I'm so familiar with the program), or alias the program to certain tasks. Still, a GUI would be very nice - if anyone ever manages to write one! If you feel up to it, or know someone interested in trying, have them contact the author via his "no-spam" e-mail address: shnutils at freeshell dot org

- M.

i really hope someone does. this is a program I think would get a lot more use by the community if it had a gui. i know I'd use it. but i'm too lazy to do things without a gui.