Italian version
Ê .emusic
18.02.03 Shorten, lossless high compression.
After mp3 and the wonderful Ogg Vorbis, a new compression format is becoming famous among the net musicians. It's called Shorten, and has got the big advantage of being a format with no information loss, that is, 'lossless'. To make a long story short, even though the files are small (normally even smaller than the corresponding mp3s), they don't undergo any technique of frequency reduction or cutting, keeping intact the fidelity of the original file once they are uncompressed. The software was originally written by Tony Robinson of Softsound, who made it become a standard especially for things as the free exchange of live music by bands such as Phish and Grateful Dead. Its popularity is also due to sites such as Etree.org and Live Music Archive, which, as well as publishing lists of ftp sites which host freely downloadable tracks, offer free hosting to the bands wanting to exploit its capabilities.