Shorten is a speedy and simple audio compressor, created by SoftSound's Tony Robinson. It efficiently codes waveforms for compression purposes.
The last version that was officially released by Tony Robinson was 2.3a. However, in the fall of 2000, the code was modified to add Unix support for seek tables, which was initially created and implemented by Wayne Stielau for the Windows platform. Thanks to Stielau's assistance, the Unix version 3.0 was created on 9/29/2000, and it has been maintained ever since.
One of the recent modifications to the software was the addition of seek tables, which enables users to go through a .shn file in real-time. Various plugins support seek tables, such as xmms-shn for XMMS, ShnAmp for WinAmp, foo_shn for foobar2000, in_shn for J River Media Jukebox/Center, and the Shorten plugin for MacAmp Lite X (which is no longer available).
In the latest release, Shorten has made some improvements to the seek table. For instance, a bug that generated erroneous seek tables for specific files (i.e., files that end with silence) has been fixed. Additionally, the seek table revision number has been changed from 0 to 1 to distinguish old and possibly defective seek tables from newer ones. The '-i' option has also been updated to identify whether a file has seek tables appended externally or none at all. If seek tables are present, the current version will display their revision number.
Version 3.6.0: N/A