I know that it has been a long time since Shorten was actively developed but after doing some searching I am still not clear why it stopped.

I don't think there's a concise answer to your question; I think it just fell by the wayside as better lossless codecs continued to evolve (e.g., WavPack, FLAC). Some reasons can be found in the the "cons" on the Lossless Comparison wiki page:

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?ti...parison#Shorten

And this:

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Shorten

edit: fixed borken link

Any improvement to the format would break compatibility, which is the only advantage it has these days.

it stopped because the developer stopped working on it.

it was then hacked to add seektables.

FLAC is a natural progression of SHN in the bootleg communities, and those communities are the only ones still using SHN at all.


later