How-to: Play Shorten (SHN) audio files in Ubuntu Linux

As a heavy user of eTree, the go-to tracker for trade-friendly live music torrents, I often trade Dead tapes in the archaic Shorten (SHN) lossless audio format.

Playing Shorten files in Windows is made easy by the understated foobar2000 music player and its handy foo_input_shorten component.

Doing the same in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx is not nearly as obvious, but still quite easy. It requires the command-line music player XMMS2 and a particular plugin, avcodec. Additionally, for a pretty GUI, you need an XMMS2 front-end client like Promoe.

Fortunately, all these steps can be accomplished in a single command:

$ sudo apt-get install xmms2 xmms2-plugin-avcodec promoe

Now you can click Applications > Sound & Video > Promoe and enjoy.

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Category: desktop
June 18th, 2010
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  1. bgw Says:
    November 24th, 2010 at 4:13 pm

    Hey thanks for this brother!

    I had not followed the xmms evolution and now want to preview shns before converting to flacs for my music server. Hunted around but didn’t notice the shorten support in avcodec…

    -Cheers!

  2. Nikil Says:
    November 13th, 2015 at 2:10 pm

    I downloaded How to Sell ebook From a WordPress blog Using Free WP Shopping Cart Plugin but I can’t find the aauctl plugin. Can somebody please tell me where I can download the shopping cart plugin?

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