Shorten was a very popular lossless audio compressor in its day. Besides being one of the earlist codecs to be developed - the author, Tony Robinson, started development in 1993 -, it was the official lossless codec of the audio trading community etree.

Here is an academic article by the author explaining the theory behind the format.

One thing that helped propel Shorten's popularity was that its sources were available (although in a custom license that forbid commercial use). But its limitations showed: compression performance is quite bad, seeking within files is very slow (seek tables were only added to the format - unofficially - in 2000 by Wayne Stielau), only mono and stereo files supported, etc. For those reasons, today the format is all but forgotten and lossless enthusiasts moved on to WavPack, FLAC, Monkey's Audio and the like.

The official, commercial Shorten web page is now only available at the Internet Archive. It features the original Shorten, with suboptimal seeking. And a mirror of the etree Shorten webpage is available too, featuring the improved version with seek tables.

Compression performance in my limited test: 60,21%


Date: 2007-03-19
Version: 3.6.1 (seek tables version)
Interface: Command line
Platform: Win32
Download: shorten-3.6.1.zip - 52kB

Date: 1999-07-29
Version: 2.3a1 (original version)
Interface: Graphical
Platform: Win32
Download: ws23a32e.exe - 377kB
Sources: shorten-2.3a.tar.gz - 379kB

Date: 2002-03-04
Version: 2.02
Interface: Winamp plugin
Platform: Win32
Download: shnamp202.exe - 146kB

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In the late nineties Michael K. Weise created a tool called mkw Audio Compression Tool (mkwACT) that was much beloved among the aforementioned etree audio trading community, since it batch-generated in one step the Shorten files and the respective .md5 files, often used back then to verify file integrity.

Besides compressing Shorten files, it can encode to MP3 (using Blade) and to its own MKW lossless format (whose compression performance is even worse than Shorten's!). It can also decode all these formats.

Version 0.97 adds support to Shorten unofficial seek tables, but it was the last version and never saw an official release. A mirror of the mkwACT web page can still be seen at the Internet Archive.

Lots of thanks to Marco Pontello for introducing me to mkwACT and reminding me about Shorten.


Date: 2000-09-29
Version: 0.97b1
Interface: Graphical
Platform: Win32
Download: mkwACT097b1.exe - 1.103kB

Date: 2000-06-08
Version: 0.96f
Interface: Graphical
Platform: Win32
Download: mkwACT096f.exe - 1.079kB

Date: 1999-10-19
Version: 0.96
Interface: Graphical
Platform: Win32
Download: mkwACT096.zip - 1.024kB