Shorten

Cutting the length of music tracks or re-encoding them in order to obtain a smaller size of the file has often a negative impact o the quality of the sound. Lossless compression is nonetheless achievable, but only if a set of specialized tools are used.

A software solution that aims to provide fast compression without any compromise in therms of quality is the one going by the name of Shorten. This particular program is made to handle waveforms and it can be deployed and operated from a Command Prompt window.

Able to compress and reconstruct the data bits perfectly, Shorten can be controlled through a set of simple commands that can be used individually or in batches. The command-line usage involves the ability to operate with several switches in order to complete one or more tasks in one go.

This application enables users to select the target waveform which will be processed and specify the noise level, the number of bytes to be copied before the compression (align bytes), the block size, which is given by the number of sound samples grouped together.

Also, with Shorten it is possible to discard some bytes before the operation and this is useful for erasing the header information, as opposed to the previously mentioned byte alignment procedure. Setting up the acceptable noise level and the number of interconnected channels can also be done prior to the compression.

Shorten is also accompanied by a set of batch tools will are made in order to facilitate the operation and make it more easy to compress waveforms, extract or decompress the files and create some so-called 'seek index files'.