tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12005378343852649672024-03-16T13:52:57.470-05:00AmpliozoneProduct development updates and related tidbits from Amplio AudioGregg Plummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04797151841680024732noreply@blogger.comBlogger168125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1200537834385264967.post-35700266977568608682017-09-21T13:31:00.000-05:002019-08-30T21:13:19.411-05:00Prototype For SaleI'm no longer in need of my original prototype, so I'm going to sell it as-is or part out the individual components. I plan to post the sale on eBay, Craigslist and some Facebook groups dedicated to audio. When I get a chance to take some photos, I might update this post. If you are interested, feel free to contact me at gregg dot plummer at gmail dot com.<br />
<br />
This first prototype consists of a combination of amp modules and a FireWire audio interface in a utilitarian aluminum chassis. I was pretty concerned with overheating because of the 5 high powered amps so I used a fairly thick aluminum to help dissipate any heat. It's also vented at the top, just above the amps and there's a very quiet 120mm fan to blow air out the back. BTW, I worked with a mechanical engineer who did some thermal analysis on the prototype to make sure we dissipated the heat. It was probably a little overkill. <strike>My price for the prototype is $825</strike>. My cost, not including the considerable amount of time designing, building and testing were about $2,500.<br />
<br />
The components included are:<br />
<br />
<strike><i>Aluminum Chassis</i> - this includes the 120mm fan, special mounting plates for the power supplies and mounting brackets for the audio interface. On the back is the A/C receptacle with a switch (A/C line cord included) and a 10A Bussman time delay fuse socket. On the front, there's a momentary pushbutton switch that has 2 operation modes. In one mode, the audio interface is powered on while the amps remain off. The other mode switches on the audio interface and all the amps. Not sure if anyone would be interested in this because the layout is designed specifically for the rest of the components.</strike> The price for the chassis is <strike>$295 </strike>$100.<br />
<br />
<i>Power supplies</i> - At the time of this design, the only practical choice for the system were linear power supplies. I really wanted to incorporate SMPS (switch mode power supplies), but ones with the characteristics I wanted for this high-quality audio application were not available. I used different amps for the front and rear channels, so the system utilizes 2 different power supplies.<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>The power supply for the rear channels includes a <strike>400 VA (115/33 Vx2) toroidal transformer</strike> and a <strike>Hypex HG power supply.</strike> My prices are $65 for the <strike>400VA toroid</strike> and <strike>$100 for the Hypex HG PS</strike>.</li>
<li>The power supply for the front channels includes a <strike>1000 VA (115/45 Vx2) toroidal transformer</strike> and a Hypex HG power supply. These are $100 for <strike>1000VA toroid</strike> and $100 for the <strike>Hypex HG PS.</strike></li>
</ul>
<div>
<strike><i>Amplifier modules</i> - I used the highest quality Hypex UcD amp modules that were available at that time. This prototype only needed to provide power to 5 channels because, in a typical 5.1 home theater system, the subwoofer is self-powered (channel .1). To each amp module, I attached an aluminum plate heat sink with fancy Neutrik speaker binding posts.</strike></div>
<div>
<ul>
<li><strike>The 3 front channels - right, center, left use Hypex UcD400AD amp modules. These are each rated at 400W RMS into 4 ohms. Unfortunately, only 2 of the 3 are currently working. The one I was using for the center channel has a faulty component that causes the amp to output a terrible thumping sound. So, I'm including it for free with either of the other working modules. I think it just might need a new cap but I'm not sure and Hypex no longer services this amp. The price for the working UcD400AD modules is $85 each or $165 for the pair. </strike></li>
<li><strike>The 2 rear surround channels use Hypex UcD180AD amp modules. They are rated at 180W RMS into 4 ohms. My price for a UcD180AD module is $65 or $125 for the pair.</strike></li>
</ul>
<div>
<i>Audio interface</i> - this is the device that your PC will use as the audio device or soundcard in your HTPC. It was the AudioFire8 and was sold by Echo Audio for something like $750. This is a high quality 8 channel FireWire audio interface typically used for audio recording and mastering. I took mine apart and reinstalled it inside my chassis. A rectangular port is cut into the front of my chassis to access the front of the AudioFire8. I also paid Echo Audio $5000 to write a custom multichannel driver so my device could output surround audio. Since my center channel amp stopped working, I used the AudioFire8's software console to reroute the center channels to the front left and right channels balanced evenly. It's now a working 4.1 system and still sounds great. I can put the AudioFire8 back in its original chassis and sell it for $175. Echo Audio still has drivers on their website that you can download for Windows 7, 8 and 8.1. They are no longer developing audio interfaces and have discontinued further updates so it may not work on Windows 10.</div>
</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<i>Misc components</i> - A handful of components were included to complete this system. To avoid the loud click that normally happens when you turn on the amps, I added <strike>Hypex's softstart module</strike>. To connect the AudioFire8 to the amps, there are custom cables with 1/4" TRS connectors. Also included is all the hookup wire between toroids, power supplies, and amps.<br />
<br />
UPDATE 2/14/2018: Items that have sold are indicated as such by striking the text. I've listed the remaining items on Craigslist here:<br />
<br />
<a href="https://madison.craigslist.org/ele/d/diy-amplifier-components/6494593237.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><strike>https://madison.craigslist.org/ele/d/diy-amplifier-components/6494593237.html</strike></a><br />
<br />
<strike>I've reassembled the Echo Audio AudioFire8 and reduced the price to $100:</strike><br />
<strike><br /></strike>
<a href="https://madison.craigslist.org/msg/d/echo-audio-audiofire8-audio/6494579793.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><strike>https://madison.craigslist.org/msg/d/echo-audio-audiofire8-audio/6494579793.html</strike></a><br />
<br />
<strike>I'm also selling an M-Audio FireWire 410 for $75:</strike><br />
<strike><br /></strike>
<a href="https://madison.craigslist.org/msg/d/audio-firewire-410-audio/6494554911.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><strike>https://madison.craigslist.org/msg/d/audio-firewire-410-audio/6494554911.html</strike></a><br />
<br />
AND,<strike> I'm selling the 5.1 speaker system that I used to demo my prototype.</strike> These are awesome speakers:<br />
<br />
<a href="https://madison.craigslist.org/ele/d/era-design-5-speaker-system/6476114140.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><strike>https://madison.craigslist.org/ele/d/era-design-5-speaker-system/6476114140.html</strike></a><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script></div>Gregg Plummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04797151841680024732noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1200537834385264967.post-35375708564550108832017-09-20T18:06:00.000-05:002017-09-20T18:06:58.806-05:00USB Audio Class 2.0 Support in Windows 10, FINALLY!!!!I was just reviewing this blog and I realized I mentioned that I'd provide updates if anything changed regarding a Microsoft driver for USB Audio Class 2.0 in a previous post way back in 2014. I failed to mention this when it was first news last Spring (2017). Besides, I don't think Microsoft made any big announcement about this. People just started to notice that the latest Microsoft Windows 10 Creators Update (a.k.a. Redstone2 or RS2) includes a new USB Audio 2.0 class driver, usbaudio2.sys.<br />
<br />
I'm not sure if this native driver supports multichannel surround but several people have used it for high-resolution stereo. Just do a google search for "USB Audio Class 2.0 Windows 10" and you'll see numerous discussions about this.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.gadgetguy.com.au/confirmed-windows-10-now-supports-usb-audio-class-2-0/" target="_blank">Confirmed: Windows 10 now supports USB Audio Class 2.0</a><br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.computeraudiophile.com/forums/topic/31422-usb-audio-20-class-driver-in-latest-windows-10-rs2/" target="_blank">USB Audio 2.0 Class Driver in latest Windows 10 RS2</a><br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.xcore.com/viewtopic.php?t=4877" target="_blank">USB Audio 2.0 support coming to Windows 10 from Microsoft</a><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Finally, after years of nonsense decisions, Microsoft is working to add a native class driver for USB Audio 2.0 devices. They are testing it in the latests Windows Insider versions:</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'Native support for USB Audio 2.0: We now have native support for USB Audio 2.0 devices with an inbox class driver! This is an early version of the driver that does not have all features enabled, for e.g.: only playback (render) is supported with this version. Recording (capture) support is scheduled to arrive in later iterations. We encourage you to play with the driver and let us know what you think (using the Feedback app). If you already have third party drivers for your USB Audio 2.0 device installed, follow instructions in this blog post to switch to using the inbox class driver.'</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<a href="http://windowsreport.com/windows-10-usb-audio-2-0/" target="_blank">Latest Windows 10 build brings native support for USB Audio 2.0</a><br />
<br />
Oh well... it's too late for us. Amplio Audio is no longer.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script></div>Gregg Plummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04797151841680024732noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1200537834385264967.post-19855625378854550402014-02-24T15:17:00.002-06:002017-09-20T18:07:31.966-05:00USB Audio Class 2.0, Windows and Computer HiFiOne of the reasons we never completed a commercial product was because we didn't have a very good interface between our hardware and the software player. I'm going to explain this in really simple terms, because I don't really want to get into all the technical details.<br />
<br />
A device driver, in this case an audio driver, is the software that controls the audio hardware attached to your computer. Our DAC/amp will not function without a driver. The prototype we built long ago, relied on a FireWire driver for operation, meaning our hardware connects to a PC using a FireWire connection. It has a "FireWorks" circuit board, designed by Echo Digital Audio, that supports 8 channels of audio at 24-bit and 192 KHz (the FireWorks can handle many more channels, but we only use 8). Echo uses this board in the AudioFire FireWire audio interfaces they sell to audio engineers. Recording studios use audio editing software like Avid's Pro Tools, Yamaha's Steinberg Cubase, Sony's Vegas/Sound Forge and Roland's Cakewalk Sonar with Echo's FireWire audio interface hardware to provide multiple connections for microphones and musical instruments to record and edit audio. Echo created custom drivers for working in Windows. The audio editing software usually works with Echo's ASIO drivers to get the best performance and Echo also provides a standard WDM (Windows Device Manager) driver so their hardware will also work as a basic soundcard in Windows.<br />
<br />
Our product was designed for listening to stereo and multichannel surround sound (I've written several posts explaining how to rip and play multichannel surround audio from DVD-Audio, SACD and Blu-ray discs), not as a recording and mastering device for pro-audio. Unfortunately, Echo's FireWire WDM driver didn't work with popular Windows programs for playing surround, like Windows Media Player or Windows Media Center. If you configured your PC to use Echo's WDM driver, you would get 4 stereo channels instead of an 8-channel device. So we contracted with Echo to update their driver to support an 8-channel WDM device. For those of you using Echo's AudioFire devices with your PCs for listening to surround music or movies, you can thank us for paying for the development of the multichannel driver. Our contract didn't say anything about exclusive use, so now all of Echo's customers benefit from these updated multichannel drivers. You can now choose between stereo mode (which will provide the 4 stereo pairs) or multichannel mode (for an 8-channel setup). Now Windows Media Center can use any FireWorks based product as a multichannel device and you can listen to full surround when you watch TV or play movies and surround audio recordings.<br />
<br />
If you were to purchase a device like ours, after connecting it to your PC (via FireWire), you'd have to install the custom driver before you could listen to surround recordings. It wouldn't be plug and play. And, if you get a new operating system, like Windows 8.1, you may need to download an update to remain compatible. So we'd have to continue paying Echo to make sure our device was supported in the case of bug fixes or updates for new operating systems. Also, back when we started this project, FireWire ports were included on most PC motherboards. That's not the case anymore, especially with the smaller form factor PCs that have great potential as HTPCs. Every PC and motherboard has multiple USB ports. So if we were to develop a commercial product, we'd switch to a USB interface and we wouldn't want to depend on a custom or proprietary driver that you'd need to install and keep up to date. Ideally, we'd want an audio device that'd work with drivers that are native to the operating system.<br />
<br />
Here's the problem, at least for Windows (including Windows 7 and Windows 8/8.1). All popular operating systems (Windows, Mac OS X and Linux) support USB Audio Class 1.0 natively. Only Mac OS X and Linux support USB Audio Class 2.0 natively. We wanted to sell our product to Windows users because that's where the best apps are for playing high resolution, surround audio and video files. USB Audio Class 1.0 was the standard developed back in 1998 and because of its limited bandwidth only supports 2 channel audio. USB Audio Class 2.0, which became a standard in 2009, has plenty of bandwidth to support multichannel audio. Since Microsoft doesn't have a native USB Audio Class 2.0 driver for Windows, you'd need a proprietary 3rd party driver. We can't afford the licensing fees and we don't want our users to deal with the hassles of installing and maintaining drivers.<br />
<br />
Microsoft's Frank Yerrace, who's part of the Windows sound team, asked the WDM driver development community (wdmaudiodev) several years ago why they would want USB Audio 2.0 in Windows. Many responded that they would like USB Audio 2.0 because of support for higher sample rates, bit depth and channel counts.<br />
<br />
I agree with David Hoatson, an engineer from <a href="http://www.lynxstudio.com/" target="_blank">Lynx Studio Technology</a>, a manufacturer of pro audio interfaces, who responded:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"now that there are more USB Audio 2.0 solutions coming to market, each company is having to develop its own driver and of course each will have varying degrees of success. Audio driver development is generally not the core competence for a chip-set company so they end up having a 3rd party company develop the driver. OEMs end up with the "not our fault" situation where the chip-set company blames the driver company and the driver company isn't being paid to fix bugs. The end result is products that don't work very well on Windows, but work better on OS X." </blockquote>
David went on to say that he thought the key issue is market acceptance:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Microsoft never supported audio on FireWire in the OS, and I would say there are fewer FireWire audio devices on the market as a result. If Microsoft supports USB Audio 2.0 in Windows, I think you will see many USB Audio 2.0 devices hit the market." </blockquote>
A later response from David spoke more to the marketing issues when he wrote:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"I understand the need to convince the upper-level management to get on-board with developing something new. Our VP of Marketing is famous for pushing his "Faster, Cheaper, Better" phrase. I think the phrase applies very well in this instance. Right now the choices for anything more than 16-bit/48kHz are VERY limited. This certainly limits the ability to create a product that will work well with Windows. USB Audio 2.0 does it faster and better, but at the moment it certainly isn't cheaper. If most of the responses were from the pro side, I think that is because we are the people that care about higher quality audio the most... and trickle down does work. Satisfy the top end client and the lower end will thrive filling the low-price-point void. In other-words, if Microsoft makes the price of entry to the market less expensive to develop, you will see the consumer price-point fill with products. ("If you build it, they will come"). Besides, do they really want Apple to beat them with USB Audio 2.0? :-)"</blockquote>
Bernt Ronningsbakk, with the Norwegian software company that develops '<a href="http://www.juicehifi.com/index.html" target="_blank">Audiolense</a>', responded to Frank Yerrace's post:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Our customers are basically consumers who are conscious about sound quality. The standard USB implementation is not good for audio. The limitations are not simply about channel count, bit depth and driver problems. It is also about the protocol used to transmit the data. It is basically a S/PDIF-equivalent protocol where the clock on the transmitter (the computer) puts a signature on the sound. S/PDIF is an inferior protocol to begin with. Add to that some added challenges with USB and it stands out as the worst alternative. Some of the jitter out of the PC will manifest itself in the analog waveform regardless of how the receiver side works. A couple of consumer/prosumer manufacturers have developed USB interfaces with asynchronous audio transmission. I don't know the details, but I assume it is equivalent to block processing or callback based buffer filling where the clock in the DAC is the only one that matters. USB has the potential to provide bit perfect transmission. As it is today, a high quality non-USB sound card is required for top quality audio rendering. USB sound cards with multichannel/bit depth capability that reflects the new waveformextensible standards with regards to channel count and bit depth would be a huge selling point to the masses. Callback-based audio streaming would be an added bonus that would bring USB into the picture also amongst those who pay whatever it takes to get the best possible sound quality. Computer based hifi has so much going for it, and a good USB audio solution would lower the threshold of entry significantly."</blockquote>
Like I said, that discussion was several years ago. I think it was around the time Windows 7 was first released and I was very disappointed that Microsoft didn't include native support for USB Audio Class 2.0. We didn't hear anything back from Microsoft or Frank Yerrace. Well actually, Frank did respond to thank everyone for their feedback, but he didn't offer any words of encouragement that would indicate Microsoft was moving toward developing a USB Audio Class 2.0 driver. Following this discussion there were a few people speculating that Microsoft doesn't think there's enough demand to justify the investment needed to develop a driver. Perhaps they are right. I've read a few other forum threads on the same topic and I haven't come across any comments that sound promising. A person (Petter103) who supposedly has close ties to Microsoft offered:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"It would cost Microsoft $50K to have a third party develop this for them (OK let's quadruple that, it is still inexpensive and enabling for consumer scenarios). Until recently, however, Microsoft has not been all that concerned with consumers. It has always been much more important to add 1000 group policy objects per year ..." and, "I have had deep contacts with Microsoft on this very topic for about 8 years now - was pushing very hard for a number of years including walking into program managers and developers offices unannounced. The sad story is that their USB Audio developer who actually contributed to the UAC2 standard quit the company, no idea what is going on now other than hearing through the grapevine that no UAC2 support is forthcoming for Windows 8. My history with Microsoft on this suggests that this will not be a feature of Windows 8, so if it is of interest to you, get yourself a third party driver (not even sure how to do that as a consumer without also buying hardware) with the benefits and caveats that implies, or switch to a platform that offers it. It is sad that this is so, because lack of driver causes fragmentation of driver model (a big third party driver vendor makes the audio driver a non-audio device ....) which in the longer term causes more problems for consumers."</blockquote>
Now that Windows 8 has shipped with no USB Audio Class 2.0 driver, it looks like Petter103 was correct. However, Windows 8 hasn't been very successful and they've had to deal with lots of media reports about its supposed big failures. The market is different now. Not only are Macs more popular than a few years ago, but now Microsoft has to compete with iPads and Android tablets. Windows 8 was suppose to tie together the smartphone, tablet and PC platforms, which you'd think would help keep loyal customers from switching, but that doesn't seem to be working. Maybe Microsoft will pay more attention to their home consumers (not just their corporate customers) and offer better audio capabilities. I was pleasantly surprised to see a new post dated 2/13/2014 from Frank Yerrace on the wdmaudiodev listserv saying:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"I had asked this list several years ago about the level of interest in USB Audio 2 and reasons for the interest. I received some private responses as well as responses to this public list. Even though in-box support ultimately was not included in Windows 8, those responses were greatly appreciated and very helpful. As you can imagine, we are constantly evaluating where to invest for future versions of Windows. I assume the interest in in-box USB Audio 2 support is still quite high. If interest has further increased or perhaps decreased for any reason, please don't hesitate to speak out." </blockquote>
First to respond was Kevin Halverson, CTO of <a href="http://highresolutiontechnologies.com/index.php" target="_blank">High Resolution Technologies, LLC</a>., a manufacturer of high quality DACs for consumers. Kevin wrote:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"USB Audio Class 2.0 support is important for a number of reasons. First, the ability to run High Speed USB is becoming a more important issue as the number of new platforms shipped with USB controllers and root hubs which properly support Full Speed USB devices properly diminishes on a nearly daily basis. Second, USB Audio Class 1.0 precludes higher sample rate, high channel count audio which for many companies like ours, means that we have to provide our own USB Audio Class 2.0 drivers. Third, the amount of maintenance necessary to keep custom drivers patched and working well across many different versions of Windows is a considerable challenge. The final point is, we constantly hear from customers that are looking to other host platforms running other operating systems just in order to get native USB Audio Class 2.0 support (and hence why we went to the time and expense of developing our own). While support of Audio Class 1.0 is important to support legacy hardware, it is fairly absurd that all these years later Microsoft still hasn't done what nearly every other operating system supplier has in terms of keeping current with audio requirements. Certainly if a small company such as ours can accomplish this, the task should be rather trivial for an industry powerhouse such as Microsoft."</blockquote>
<div>
Again, in this thread there are responses that, depending on your point of view, are pessimistic or realistic. Tim Roberts, a consultant with Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc. and Microsoft Partner, was quick to argue:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"There has to be a business case to justify the considerable development and testing expense. Standards are only interesting if they are used. If USB Audio 2 is a niche standard that is only interesting to a tiny fraction of the market (and the current evidence suggests that is the case), then it doesn't make sense to develop a class driver. To four decimal places, Audio Class 1.0 satisfies 100% of the Windows users in the world." </blockquote>
<div>
To which Timothy Knudtson, a Software Engineer with <a href="http://iconnectivity.com/" target="_blank">iConnectivity</a>, replied:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Where does this number come from? In the audio industry things are moving towards using USB Audio 2.0. USB Audio 1 may work for 100% of the Windows users because for those users who want USB Audio 2.0 they are simply switching to Mac." </blockquote>
<div>
Tim responded:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"The problem is sheer volume. There are a billion Windows machines in the world. How many really need to use USB Audio 2 devices right now? Maybe 1,000? Maybe 10,000? 999,990,000 out of a billion is 100%, to four significant digits. That's the problem Microsoft faces. They need to make sure all of the corporate secretaries in the world can listen to Michael Bolton through iTunes. 16-channel 192 kHz audio is cool, but there just isn't widespread business demand for it yet."</blockquote>
Jerry Evans, who I believe is a developer with <a href="http://novadsp.com/index.htm" target="_blank">Instrumental Innovations</a>, replied:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Lack of standards compliance from Microsoft is a barrier for vendors and dissuades consumers from purchasing ‘unsupported’ hardware. Build it and they will come. WASAPI has enabled us to push this project forward. I’m not convinced anyone could have made a business case for its provision. But eventually it arrived, and was quickly supported by all the major DAW’s. Surely a much, much tougher nut to crack than a relatively mundane driver … "</blockquote>
<div>
And Philip Gruebele added:</div>
<div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"I think that the lack of standards support is not a strategy that Microsoft can continue pursuing in today's competitive market. It is doing the same thing as the lack of Bluetooth Low Energy support under Windows Phone. The competition (aka Apple & Google) is simply leaving Microsoft behind in this regard."</blockquote>
</div>
<div>
I thought this response to Frank was very interesting. Børge Strand-Bergesen, who's a hardware guy working on an open source DAC project (<a href="http://www.qnktc.com/" target="_blank">Audio Widget Project</a>), had this to say:</div>
<div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"We have an open source Windows UAC2 ASIO driver. Ideally, we'd have a Windows UAC2 driver like the one on Mac and Linux. But since we don't, what I wish to do next is gather enough force to make a fully fledged UAC2 driver and release it under GPL. One centrally distributed device driver with the potential of supporting all UAC2 hardware. The 30-60 demographic has a lot of users who still prefer a PC over a tablet, and who love their music. My doctor is the perfect fit. He loves classical music. After trying a couple different DACs he's ended up with quite the driver collection and resulting DLL version inconsistencies. Now he's in the market for a Mac to play his music, even though he has no other use for one. I have watched the HiEnd audio scene and built DACs for some years now. People borrow and test each other's DACs the whole time. The lack of native UAC2 drivers on Windows is the <u>single largest inhibitor</u> of growth for high resolution audio. Having to install a driver scares away a large chunk of <u>today's</u> customer base, and it prevents that customer base from growing. DLL conflicts and crappy user interfaces push even more users into the Mac camp, where things work out of the box. Getting the promised sample rate in real life is important. Kbps sells just like megapixels. The hardware brand owners also have to struggle with the costly licensing terms of commercial drivers. Those are actually among the largest inhibitors of growth among those who supply to the early adopter users in the DAC market. The demand for UAC2 support on Win7 and onwards does not yet come from Logitech and Sony. It comes from the little guy like me who sells a couple hundred DACs to early adopters. Satisfy those, and HiFi brands like NAD and Rotel will start selling to larger groups. Satisfy those, and the Logitechs will follow. UAC2 support can easily be made a winning sales pitch for Windows PCs. </blockquote>
</div>
<div>
In response to Børge, Kevin Halverson, said:</div>
<div>
<blockquote>
"An open source driver is an interesting idea, but native Windows support for both USB Audio Class 1.0 and 2.0 devices would be infinitely better. While we ship nowhere near the numbers of products as a Logitech and Sony, we do ship +50k units annually and a disproportionate percentage are to Mac and Linux users than one would expect based upon market share of these two platforms. I find it hard to believe that Microsoft's vast resources would even notice the trivial effort necessary to provide a USB Audio Class 2.0 driver (host stack), our small engineering staff accomplished our own in a matter of a few months and that included a lot of research and coming up to speed on what would be well known internally at Microsoft. I really wonder how this could even be something that would have to be considered for more than a moment, it just shouldn't be much of a task. Well, if nothing else. Its getting discussed again."</blockquote>
</div>
<div>
Here's another person with a good response to Frank's query, from Chris Barker: </div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"I've been a lurker on this thread for a while. I'm not actively involved in the industry, but I am an audiophile and been dealing with PC (e.g. Windows) audio for decades. If there is a need to further prove the audience size for improved high bitrate audio support built in Windows, one only has to contact the guys at <a href="http://lhlabs.com/" target="_blank">LH Labs</a> and their very successful Kickstarter and Indiegoo Geek DAC projects. Anything that can improve and make Windows more "plug'n play" and "it just works" for high quality audio devices would be a good thing for the world in general and users (and thus Microsoft by better perception) in particular. Also check out your favorite consumer audio magazine like Stereophile and The Absolute Sound. Each month's cover always features computer audio articles and now DSD in particular. Many of the writers who are very analog and not computer savvy revert to Mac machines because of the perceived easier experience in getting these systems working. Microsoft should be concerned at this example of quality and ease of use gap."</blockquote>
<div>
To counter Chris's enthusiasm, Tim Roberts, the devil's advocate of the group, responded:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"It is really hard to talk about topics like this in an objective and business-oriented way, because the whole arena is filled with so much astrology and incense and pyramids. Physiologically, 384kHz audio is just dumb, as is 192kHz and 96kHz. Anything more than 48kHz is just wasted bits. Sure, a few people are willing to spend money for that kind of equipment -- those are the same people keep telling themselves that tube amplifiers are better. They are buying Macs because Macs are cooler. I'm just not sure that a company like Microsoft can ever have mindshare in that population. Even if they released a USB Audio 2 driver stack tomorrow, I don't think it would be trusted."</blockquote>
<div>
So Marc Lindahl of <a href="http://engineering.bowery.com/" target="_blank">Bowery Engineering</a>, responded:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Wow, clearly not a pro audio guy. While there is ongoing debate in the professional audio community and the audiophile community regarding 176.4KHz and up, there is little anymore that there is great utility for 96K and 88.2K in addition to generally superior sound quality to 44.1K/48K. The market shows there is a demand for high sample rates and bit depths, Microsoft should be interested in that. It's not 'just a few people'. Windows continues to enjoy popularity among audio pros for running various DAW software, and audiophiles as well. The market is there."</blockquote>
<div>
And Børge wrote:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"I'm sorry Tim, but this is like saying Canon should've stopped adding megapixels once their cameras got 4 or so of them. kHz is a simple number. Comparing the kHz of your audio
system will be done in the consumer crowds just like they compared the MHz of
their CPUs and the megapixels of their cameras. The more you have of that
simple metric, the better they will feel. And at the moment, Microsoft is the audio equivalent of a
3 megapixels camera or a Pentium 4 computer."</blockquote>
To which Tim replied:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"No, this is not a valid comparison. Our eyes can tell the difference between 300 dpi and 600 dpi, and a 4 MP camera can only do about 200 dpi when printed at 8.5x11. Those extra pixels ARE being put to use. The same is simply not true of audio. You don't "zoom in" on an audio track. The concept doesn't make sense. The best human ears are physically unable to sense frequencies above about 20 kHz. Per Nyquist, anything above twice that frequency serves no purpose at all. They CANNOT, physically, alter what we sense in the sound. That's voodoo, not engineering. Those MHz and megapixels are being used. Those extra kHz are utterly pointless. Unlike the other two, we have reached a physical limit."</blockquote>
Philip Gruebele replied to Tim by writing:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Three points worth making:</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<ol>
<li>Whether or not it is technically necessary to support higher sample rates is not relevant. What is relevant is whether the market demands it, and it undeniably does. Otherwise why would so many companies - hardware manufacturers and download services - invest so many resources to make it happen?</li>
<li>Using Nyquist and human hearing to make a case for not supporting higher sample rates is looking at the issue too narrowly. The reason higher sample rates can be better are complex and include things like simplifying DAC design and out-of-band filtering. Also some protocols like DSD64 over DoP require 176.4Khz and DSD128 requires double that just to get the data across. UA2.0 also supports certain use cases which are not possible with UA1.0. The minimum sample rate that should be supported is at least 384Khz and UA2.0 has handled all these cases for many years.</li>
<li>The lack of USB Audio 2.0 support causes a headache for consumers because they have to deal with low quality, poorly tested, third party drivers. These drivers are not going away because of point (1). There are a LOT of high-end audio enthusiasts who voted against Windows by using Apple products because they provide a better end-user experience."</li>
</ol>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
There were a few followup responses that went into technical details about the advantages of USB Audio Class 2.0 ver Class 1.0, but what you read above covers the main debate. The last posting was about a week ago on 2/16/2014. I hope these responses to Frank's inquiry will have some effect at Microsoft and convince them to develop a native USB Audio Class 2.0 driver for a future version of Windows. Time will tell. If I hear anything, I'll keep you posted.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script></div>Gregg Plummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04797151841680024732noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1200537834385264967.post-12288369155567028902014-02-14T13:25:00.000-06:002014-02-15T10:39:55.457-06:00Playing and Ripping Blu-rays with your PCAfter finally posting <a href="http://amplioaudio.blogspot.com/2014/02/playing-and-ripping-sacd-with-your-pc.html" target="_blank">my SACD ripping article</a>, I decided to do a quick follow-up and describe my method for ripping and playing Blu-rays with my PC. I've been using the same method for a fairly long time and haven't bothered to learn if there is a new method that might be better. Again, leave a comment if you know a better method.<br />
<br />
First, I'm going to address the issue of Blu-ray playback using my PC. Back in the end of 2008 I posted an article about <a href="http://amplioaudio.blogspot.com/2008/12/its-been-awhile-problems-playing-blyu.html" target="_blank">problems I had playing Blu-rays with my PC</a>. I had trouble because my hardware didn't comply with the software Blu-ray player's DRM technology. Programs like Cyberlink's PowerDVD and ArcSoft's TotalMedia Theater check if your hardware has a protected audio path (PAP) and if not, will decrease the audio bit depth and sample rate to 16 bits and 48kHz. My setup, which doesn't have a "protected path," is capable of 24-bit/192 kHz playback, so I was/am disappointed with this downgrade. Of course the purpose is to prevent piracy. The industry doesn't want to let someone capture the perfect bits and share them on the Internet, like they can with tracks from CDs (and DVDs, and with a bit of work, SACDs).<br />
<br />
Two of our PCs connected to our home network are Blu-ray capable. Our HTPC in our family room has a BD-ROM drive and the PC in my office has a BD burner. The HTPC has my prototype audio equipment (8-channel DAC and Hypex Class-D amp modules) and it doesn't support PAP, so with ArcSoft's TMT3 the audio gets downgraded. The PC in my office has an ASUS soundcard that is PAP compliant, so TMT3 doesn't downgrade the audio there. ArcSoft has since been upgraded several generations and the current version is 6.5. I haven't bothered to upgrade because they still downgrade the audio, and I can't find any other advantage to upgrading.<br />
<br />
We prefer to watch Blu-rays in the family room because the HTPC is hooked up to a nice 47" flat screen HDTV and the audio system is very good. The PC in my office is connected to a 24" LCD monitor and even though the audio system in my office is pretty good, it's not nearly as good as the one in our family room. After a little research (<a href="http://www.avsforum.com/t/1033822/hd-to-mkv-the-options-are-endless" target="_blank">HD to mkv ....the options are endless</a>), I figured out how to play the main movie/feature of the Blu-rays with the HTPC (family room) without downgraded audio. If I ripped the video and audio from the Blu-ray disc and put the audio into a FLAC (free lossless audio codec) container and then merged the audio and video into an MKV file, I could use other players to watch my Blu-rays. Here's the trade-off: I could no longer just insert the Blu-ray disc into my BD drive, run TMT3 and navigate the menus to watch the movies and/or extras. Now I could only play the MKV file, just like I would with any other video file on my computer. At least the audio was no longer downgraded. So, when you extract the audio and video from a Blu-ray, you can choose to get the main feature and whatever extras, but they become separate audio/video files. So you can no longer use that nice Blu-ray menu to navigate the content on your disc. I decided I could live with that for the main feature. If I wanted to watch the extras, I could simply insert the Blu-ray disc in the drive and navigate the menus. Most of the time the audio quality isn't that great in the special features anyhow.<br />
<br />
I'll cover my ripping methods in a little more detail, later. To play the MKVs extracted from my Blu-ray discs, I can use either WMC (Windows Media Center), MPC-HC (Media Player Classic - Home Cinema) or my current favorite, JRMC (J.River Media Center). There are other programs like VLC media player that can play these MKVs, but I prefer WMC, MPC-HC or JRMC. At first it was a little tricky to get everything to work. At the time (this was several years ago), I needed the correct combination of codecs installed on computers. It all seemed pretty confusing, but by following the recommendations I found online, I finally got it to work. The main components I had to install for ripping and playing MKVs sourced from Blu-rays were a DTS decoder, which can decode the high resolution DTS-HD Master audio tracks commonly used in Blu-rays, a program that can split the audio and video tracks into separate files and another to merge them back together. Like I said, it was a little complicated at first. Thankfully, it's become a lot simpler now. One of the key components, the DTS decoder, is included with my copy of ArcSoft's TMT, so that's why it is still installed on my systems. Occasional I run TMT3 to use the menus, but most of the time, I never use it for watching the main movies. If you decide to use WMC or MPC-HC to play your MKVs, you'll need to make sure you have the right codecs and tools installed. If you use JRMC, you really don't have to worry about installing a bunch of codecs, everything you need is provided when you install JRMC. Also, when I first played MKVs from Blu-ray, I had to convert the audio tracks to FLAC if I wanted to listen with full resolution. Since then, new codecs or tools are available that let me play the original DTS-HD or Dolby True-HD audio tracks with MPC-HC or JRMC. Thanks to a German guy named nevcairiel and his <a href="http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=156191" target="_blank">LAV Filters</a>, you can now play all the audio codecs with these other players.<br />
<br />
The best user interface for playing our movies is WMC. And to compliment WMC, I use 'My Movies' to help manage my collection and display a very nice menu strip in WMC. 'My Movies' is also used for organizing the DVDs stored on our media server. The UI for JRMC is a close second to WMC and the MPC-HD UI is the most basic, because it doesn't have a nice menu list of our movies, like you get with WMC or JRMC (note: JRMC takes a little tweaking to get a menu list of movies, so it's a little more work than WMC). However, JRMC seems to give us better playback results. The audio and video quality are a bit better than the quality we were getting when using WMC. However, the WAF (wife acceptance factor) of WMC was higher and she didn't really notice the quality difference. There was one major annoyance that convinced my wife and kids to switch to JRMC. When you play a full resolution Blu-ray, the audio tracks have a fairly high dynamic range. There's a big difference between the quiet and loud passages. My family is very sensitive to loud noise (I'm much more tolerant) and whenever there are explosions or other loud passages, they quickly use the remote to lower the sound level. Then when the dialog is quiet, they increase the volume. It's particularly annoying when the quiet dialog is suddenly interrupted with a big explosion. So when we are watching movies, my wife is constantly adjusting the volume to find a comfortable middle ground. Now, with the latest version of JRMC (v19), they have a new DSP feature called "Adaptive Volume" that automatically adjusts playback volume. It dynamically adjusts the volume, while preserving dynamic range, so loud and quiet parts are a little closer (normalized) and you no longer need to constantly adjust the volume while watching. WMC doesn't have this type of feature.<br />
<br />
There are several programs out there for ripping Blu-rays. I'm going to describe my two favorite methods. The first method is a little more hassle because it involves multiple steps. I'll refer to this as the manual method. The second method is much easier because you run a single application with a nice user interface and a few simple steps. Both of these methods preserve the original quality of the audio and video of the Blu-ray. There are other programs that will reduce the resolution or bitrate if you want to watch the movie on a portable device like your smartphone or tablet. The methods described here retain the highest quality.<br />
<br />
<b>1. Manually Ripping Blu-rays</b><br />
The reason I'm going to describe the manual method is because I use it for music Blu-rays, like concert performances, when I want to create both a copy of the video performance and another copy of just the audio tracks that I can play in my music library. I'll show some screenshots, but I'm not going to cover every detail necessary to get this to work. You may need to refer to other websites for those details (I'll provide links below).<br />
<br />
For this example, I'm going to rip my Blu-ray titled "Live at the Isle of Wight Festival 1970" by The Who. I'm using 2 main programs to rip and create my MKV file, which I will save as a concert movie. I'm also going to use a couple of other tools to extract the audio tracks as individual FLAC files. Then I can add them to my music library. In order to rip a Blu-ray disc, the program will need to decrypt the disc to get around the copy protection (BD+, AACS, and other DRM protections). If the ripping application doesn't have this capability, which is the case with the manual method I'm describing here, then you'll need to install a decrypter and have it running before you can start ripping. I'm using Slysoft's 'AnyDVD HD'. This is a commercial program that I purchased a long time ago (originally, I bought AnyDVD to decrypt my DVDs and later upgraded to the HD version for use with Blu-rays). I also needed 'AnyDVD HD' just to play copy protected discs with TMT3. With 'AnyDVD HD' installed and running, I'm ready to rip this Blu-ray concert disc.<br />
<br />
Sometimes I'll use TMT3 to look at the Blu-ray menus. Usually, the menus for a concert disc will list the songs, but sometimes they are organized as chapters. The menus can also be used to identify the bonus features and determine if there might be additional songs or concert footage not included on the main feature. In the case of this disc, the songs are also listed in the insert and on the back of the sleeve. As you probably know, when you rip one of your CDs, the ripping program will pull down information from an online database to provide information for tagging your songs. They will use the database from Gracenote (a fee based service) or freedb (an open source free metadata service) to provide the tags for artist, album, title, genre, etc. These types of databases don't exist for Blu-rays. You'll have to provide this information manually.<br />
<br />
Like I mentioned earlier, the manual method is a multiple step process. The first program, eac3to.exe, will extract the audio and video into separate files. It will also save a chapter file and a subtitles file. The audio track will be losslessly converted from whatever version is on the disc to FLAC. Now, eac3to.exe is a command line utility, which isn't exactly the easiest thing to work with, so I use a program that provides a nicer user interface for eac3to.exe called 'Another EAC3toGUI'. Here's a screenshot of the interface:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivd4VzCZKzqat74FzJ4Fb-2RE5AyAyp3JuBcZVY1n5Axq6beGRiwPBLLq3UrUUfD8TCZ0Dmg9T73POLQsr1vqb2be7yQLlqfsoX63y28aBBYEYqni3-AMkJnjBlo7_cyKu9xCj4SM8RUI/s1600/aeac3to1.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivd4VzCZKzqat74FzJ4Fb-2RE5AyAyp3JuBcZVY1n5Axq6beGRiwPBLLq3UrUUfD8TCZ0Dmg9T73POLQsr1vqb2be7yQLlqfsoX63y28aBBYEYqni3-AMkJnjBlo7_cyKu9xCj4SM8RUI/s1600/aeac3to1.JPG" height="247" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
'Another EAC3toGUI' works if you have all the necessary tools that eac3to.exe uses for extracting and encoding Blu-rays. Before we begin ripping, I'm going to show how this program is setup. By picking 'Options' under the Tools menu, I can verify my settings.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjj8VA0cXi6OyYbpvT1vbkXl84jNIoeSQoYFP1rJxuXwWBp0-bRyVVpyVN1_K5NQukMbqIy2PDxDTTNQpl0FOy9CTorcz1QFzNsboivXzriNRWqKwKwovkysZGk9OCxgB7i9vNEEacoGbg/s1600/aeac3tosettings.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjj8VA0cXi6OyYbpvT1vbkXl84jNIoeSQoYFP1rJxuXwWBp0-bRyVVpyVN1_K5NQukMbqIy2PDxDTTNQpl0FOy9CTorcz1QFzNsboivXzriNRWqKwKwovkysZGk9OCxgB7i9vNEEacoGbg/s1600/aeac3tosettings.JPG" height="286" width="320" /></a></div>
In this dialog, you provide the location of all of the programs used for ripping your Blu-ray. As you can see, you need to include the path for eac3to.exe, BDSup2Sup, which is used to extract and convert the subtitles data, and MKVMerge, which is used to reassemble the audio, video, chapters and subtitle files into the final MKV. As you can see, this program doesn't provide any video options. It will extract the video, but it won't modify or re-encode it in any way. So if the video is encoded as 1080p (1920x1080 resolution) H.264/AVC, that's what you get. There are several options for the audio and depending on the disc, you may have several different audio tracks to choose from. I always choose the highest quality audio track available. Most of the times, a Blu-ray will have a surround audio track losslessly encoded with DTS-HD MA or Dolby TrueHD. If that's the case, this program will convert these tracks to lossless FLAC. There will be no loss of quality going from one lossless format to another lossless format. Sometimes, a Blu-ray will not include a lossless audio track and instead uses a lossy format like DTS or Dolby AC3. If that's the case, 'Another EAC3toGUI' will just save the audio as is without encoding to FLAC.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg76lgkXAXHJ1IqJHHb4-u_0eJmeKmyXqeg79MraLFzFxFj4Mf2mP6eTpiGlDBLnMNpCRlNALsFUF7cNfY06c-9AswxkCNqZYP7Jo3JKDW5kgahZx0_W8eh8aU0vRj46NO6t-tnBvVIIno/s1600/aeac3toinfo.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg76lgkXAXHJ1IqJHHb4-u_0eJmeKmyXqeg79MraLFzFxFj4Mf2mP6eTpiGlDBLnMNpCRlNALsFUF7cNfY06c-9AswxkCNqZYP7Jo3JKDW5kgahZx0_W8eh8aU0vRj46NO6t-tnBvVIIno/s1600/aeac3toinfo.JPG" height="252" width="320" /></a></div>
I believe eac3to is short for "encode 'ac3' to". AC3 is the lossy audio encoding format developed by Dolby Laboratories and is commonly used in DVDs. It is also referred to as "Dolby Digital." This tool has been around for a long time and can now handle all of the Dolby format's including their lossless TrueHD format used with many Blu-rays. However, eac3to.exe cannot decode the other popular lossy audio encoding format, DTS (also used on DVDs) and their very popular lossless format DTS-HD MA (used on Blu-rays). That's why I still have ArcSoft's TMT3 still installed. It handles the decoding of the DTS formats. If you pick 'EACto info...' under the Tools menu, you can see if you have the required codecs. I use this program only for ripping Blu-rays, so I don't use some of the other codecs on this list. For Blu-rays, I'm using 'ArcSoft DTS Decoder (1.1.0.0) and for splitting out the audio, video, subtitles and chapters, I use 'Haali Matroska Muxer'.<br />
<br />
Now I'm ready to rip. 'Another EAC3toGUI' can rip the main feature from your Blu-ray disc and create an MKV file with the original video merged with the new FLAC encoded audio. You end up with a high quality audio/video file of your movie or concert. However, since I want both the concert video performance and the audio tracks, I'm not going to let 'Another EAC3toGUI' merge everything back together. Instead, I'm going to use the "Command Line" feature to generate the separate components. Looking at the main screen again, you can see that the 'Stream Path' shows the location of the Blu-ray source. In this case, it's my Blu-ray drive (F:) and it automatically found the titles in the STREAM folder. As you can see, it found 2 titles or playlists.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRP4bTyd_wI_J6-cIuOIhyju7JKtpLfaRhDy4kCLph_P-Ry81GpI6xcHgtiudGng4g_A8jqtzjwSUftfPuwVkAd0zuwa0f97M1cBk9WILCzyGbhP-igF1YEp7ny8S258We5qNtCzMosdc/s1600/aeac3to2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRP4bTyd_wI_J6-cIuOIhyju7JKtpLfaRhDy4kCLph_P-Ry81GpI6xcHgtiudGng4g_A8jqtzjwSUftfPuwVkAd0zuwa0f97M1cBk9WILCzyGbhP-igF1YEp7ny8S258We5qNtCzMosdc/s1600/aeac3to2.JPG" height="247" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
You can usually identify the main feature by the duration. Playlist 1 has a duration of 1:26:25 and playlist 2's duration is 0:38:58. On the back of the Blu-ray's sleeve, it says the running time is approximately 134 minutes. This running time is almost always for the main feature, but it doesn't seem to apply in this case. They must be referring to the total cumulative duration of the concert and all the bonus features. For this example, I've picked playlist 1 because it is the longest. Playlist 1 also has more high resolution audio tracks to choose from including the stereo RAW/PCM and multi-channel DTS-HD MA.<br />
<br />
I've also entered the path and default filename for the output files under the 'Output File' section.The source audio/video streams are listed under the 'Source Stream Files' section. When you pick one of the streams (in this case only one stream is listed), it will automatically start playing in the preview window if you have "Play when selected" checked. You can preview the stream to also make sure you're picking the correct title or playlist.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAYLK1qpP7AmbROwI4U9QhRPwGAaMAHJGzRdgD9cX0G2y3qHMKa7x55s84iP8dhw3J4A2wv__-G4bqQuBRS4E_fFCVfIkyL56spvTkAgvEI16ySQivQ7YZ2zVy3NL3nivrCcTnr5inJbo/s1600/aeac3to3.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAYLK1qpP7AmbROwI4U9QhRPwGAaMAHJGzRdgD9cX0G2y3qHMKa7x55s84iP8dhw3J4A2wv__-G4bqQuBRS4E_fFCVfIkyL56spvTkAgvEI16ySQivQ7YZ2zVy3NL3nivrCcTnr5inJbo/s1600/aeac3to3.JPG" height="247" width="320" /></a></div>
To start the ripping process, I pick the 'Command Line' button. First, it analyzes the playlist and displays another window. The top section shows the commands that will run 'eac3to.exe' from a command line and the bottom section is a list of options that you can apply to 'eac3to.exe'.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzBQKR64pTYV9bwmbrjGRwtJg4sPpej0NzDAjP9Sn9K2_IhKTFOMXYX6wlHtiKfWKbHfETqjimXTQ_SpSToXuwsJVZYzA31jkwDfgz8ZJkVkYIo8PQ1KpTYjhOPJ-ox_SdfQqioHkZpYE/s1600/aeac3tocommand.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzBQKR64pTYV9bwmbrjGRwtJg4sPpej0NzDAjP9Sn9K2_IhKTFOMXYX6wlHtiKfWKbHfETqjimXTQ_SpSToXuwsJVZYzA31jkwDfgz8ZJkVkYIo8PQ1KpTYjhOPJ-ox_SdfQqioHkZpYE/s1600/aeac3tocommand.JPG" height="318" width="320" /></a></div>
As you can see, it has created an 'eac3to.exe' command with arguments for extracting the chapters and the RAW/PCM audio tracks. This Blu-ray doesn't include subtitles, so that isn't listed. There are a bunch of components that 'Another EAC3toGUI' didn't pick, including the h264/AVC video track and the DTS Master multi-channel audio track. Normally, it chooses the highest quality audio and video tracks by default. For some strange reason, 'Another EAC3toGUI' doesn't like interlaced video. As you can see above, the video track is listed as 1080i60. The "i" means it is interlaced. The highest quality audio track is the least compressed format and in this case that's the uncompressed RAW/PCM. Actually, since the DTS Master Audio is lossless, its quality is the same as the uncompressed PCM, but that's the choice this program makes by default. I would like both, so I'm going to pick the checkbox for '5: DTS Master Audio, English, 5.1 channels, 24 bits, 96kHz'. I also want the video track, so I'll pick '2: h264/AVC, 1080i60/1.001 (16:9). Since I don't want any of the other components, I'll leave them unchecked. Before picking the 'Run Command' button, I can review the 'eac3to.exe' command arguments. Normally, I'd just run the command, but I know from experience that the current settings won't work.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpeAf4kBwp60_Y56AA463IddCCL4ruGiGNJOP63VOqU7-xdTBfQ4UPETTjEaYqhxI-S56EdmqfTquUAygMP403Esczc78QM0jE3QocpNSl85bUqqoi-e10jMtyoYSFg3rY3ep7GHkEhxU/s1600/aeac3tocommand2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpeAf4kBwp60_Y56AA463IddCCL4ruGiGNJOP63VOqU7-xdTBfQ4UPETTjEaYqhxI-S56EdmqfTquUAygMP403Esczc78QM0jE3QocpNSl85bUqqoi-e10jMtyoYSFg3rY3ep7GHkEhxU/s1600/aeac3tocommand2.JPG" height="318" width="320" /></a></div>
The command line part after 2: doesn't make any sense to 'eac3to.exe' and it will just make the program end in error. For some reason it seems to misinterpret the "(16:9)" part and it changes it to "(16.ac3", so I've edited it to an argument that will work. I've simply deleted everything past 1080i60 and replaced with ".mkv", which will put this video track into a temporary MKV container.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj22DGnPi17Yqq15kJsEPh8cw4XicC4xomfBs_4UkriQhwOZSeKMQ2xnu1r0EmN8peNmMm549Qf0aCzygTsGDuk_1BMlMVM6WDqOdu4CBcbgQztHANexvhfPKkxwbCE2gaEIiuMbcQ3ayM/s1600/aeac3tocommand3.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj22DGnPi17Yqq15kJsEPh8cw4XicC4xomfBs_4UkriQhwOZSeKMQ2xnu1r0EmN8peNmMm549Qf0aCzygTsGDuk_1BMlMVM6WDqOdu4CBcbgQztHANexvhfPKkxwbCE2gaEIiuMbcQ3ayM/s1600/aeac3tocommand3.JPG" height="318" width="320" /></a></div>
Now, I'm ready, so I can pick "Run Command." This will activate a command window and you can see 'eac3to.exe' do its job.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhThq5B-8ENq8JAnPws44Q1PIbddb5fBPztIq-fWSv4jfzs2DwWu2k2g-cShuU4Oh4aEtzJAAXzUkQeI_wzEEJJ3AupzSqewskzM_MYaQKvlrNkEjEc6ckgdJHJzwud8-oOPeNBcm_XneE/s1600/aeac3tocommand4.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhThq5B-8ENq8JAnPws44Q1PIbddb5fBPztIq-fWSv4jfzs2DwWu2k2g-cShuU4Oh4aEtzJAAXzUkQeI_wzEEJJ3AupzSqewskzM_MYaQKvlrNkEjEc6ckgdJHJzwud8-oOPeNBcm_XneE/s1600/aeac3tocommand4.JPG" height="161" width="320" /></a></div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlRydHxZ7tsxnJfxDDVbXGQfarZqkSnS1OIpb5KHdpm_FyMv06l-pjC_hi0k0f33sELngfNaiNGlY8fgJewC7mMq-A9PUMZ5wcvOeA4fVw_IOzgD_jXSxIuO6aLVy6aQ8pki3Hf3O15Yc/s1600/Output.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlRydHxZ7tsxnJfxDDVbXGQfarZqkSnS1OIpb5KHdpm_FyMv06l-pjC_hi0k0f33sELngfNaiNGlY8fgJewC7mMq-A9PUMZ5wcvOeA4fVw_IOzgD_jXSxIuO6aLVy6aQ8pki3Hf3O15Yc/s1600/Output.JPG" height="88" width="320" /></a>The resulting four files (a chapter file, the video file, a stereo PCM audio file, which will be converted to stereo FLAC, and a multichannel FLAC audio file from the DTS Master Audio track) will be stored in the folder I've chosen for the output. In this case, that's a folder I've named "MyMKVFile."<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNhDqYHOpE66RGQymtlJXrk-2rr4vMIgpKuwTB484W6MJeUeoT5lqjpb4u6YCzdvUz2J0Wpwn03543Vh_SZbAgxPKAuRlAlyBVjKFdpsD-KiTZ2cjundeh7S1rx_szgTkMrUWtdFdjzkU/s1600/Chapters.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNhDqYHOpE66RGQymtlJXrk-2rr4vMIgpKuwTB484W6MJeUeoT5lqjpb4u6YCzdvUz2J0Wpwn03543Vh_SZbAgxPKAuRlAlyBVjKFdpsD-KiTZ2cjundeh7S1rx_szgTkMrUWtdFdjzkU/s1600/Chapters.JPG" height="298" width="320" /></a></div>
I have everything I need to create the concert video MKV and surround sound and stereo albums for my music library. First, I'm going to generate the audio albums. The FLAC files I have are audio of the whole concert. I would like to split them into individual tracks for each song. To accomplish this, I'm going to create a CUE file, which I can use to split the audio into separate files. A CUE file, is a metadata file which describes how the tracks of a CD are laid out and are stored as plain text files and commonly have a ".cue" filename extension. All I need is the start time information in the chapter file and the song titles listed on the back of the Blu-ray's sleeve. The number of chapters in the chapter file match the number of songs listed on the sleeve. Here's a snippet of the chapter file. To create the CUE file, I use a template, with the basic format, instead of starting from scratch. Here's a portion of my edited CUE file:<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEig2NVbbi1Grvb9o9DWNGGKj3mQil8UBx_oEag2Icl65sqmETKRF1YGPSLbWrkqBZlsuJAsRfum4ovt6pYE6kMAsLNQLYtU9-1BuKBMs2ZlB_7F3S8gvkkJV0ZOQERtQYWeKBpSJhIjeSQ/s1600/CUE.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEig2NVbbi1Grvb9o9DWNGGKj3mQil8UBx_oEag2Icl65sqmETKRF1YGPSLbWrkqBZlsuJAsRfum4ovt6pYE6kMAsLNQLYtU9-1BuKBMs2ZlB_7F3S8gvkkJV0ZOQERtQYWeKBpSJhIjeSQ/s1600/CUE.JPG" height="267" width="320" /></a></div>
I've used the times from the chapter file for the start times of each track. The format for time is a little different in the chapter file and the CUE file. The chapter file uses HH:MM:SS.xxx and the CUE file use MM:SS:xx (where xx or xxx is fractions of the second). So for a chapter that starts at 01:06:05.295, I wrote 66:05:29 for the track start in the CUE file. You can test your CUE file with any program that can read them. I usually use foobar2000 because it's quick and easy. After right clicking the CUE and picking 'Open with foobar2000' I can see if it worked and I can test each track to verify that I've got the right times and track titles.<br />
<br />
Using foobar's convert tool, I'm going to generate individual tracks from the big FLAC file identified in my CUE file. I have the convert utility set to convert to FLAC, so basically all it will do is create the 23 individual tracks. You can also accomplish this with other programs like JRMC. Once I've generated all my tracks for the FLAC file that was originally multichannel DTS-HD MA, I can repeat this process for the stereo RAW/PCM tracks. All I have to do is edit the CUE file and change the designated file so it uses the RAW PCM file instead of the DTS Master file.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEia1eoPmuuXcrCvTUdPSVvwN_PJbc_gD74AFsEVq-yGufs5IbXZ9i1iqc8dMBPZ4yNiT1RN_RiDcy6oMcNpy2KMxtD3FOi34ADHd74PDl2X79S5LM8lbs07r3ZrNfXLZyg_heyn1EcKneY/s1600/foobar2000.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEia1eoPmuuXcrCvTUdPSVvwN_PJbc_gD74AFsEVq-yGufs5IbXZ9i1iqc8dMBPZ4yNiT1RN_RiDcy6oMcNpy2KMxtD3FOi34ADHd74PDl2X79S5LM8lbs07r3ZrNfXLZyg_heyn1EcKneY/s1600/foobar2000.JPG" height="204" width="320" /></a></div>
I now have the individual audio tracks, both stereo and surround, and I can move them to my media server and import them into my JRMC music library. This Blu-ray also included some bonus material. I can use 'Another EAC3to GUI' to select the 2nd playlist where these bonus tracks were stored and then run through this process again.<br />
<br />
Now that I have my audio albums, I can create my concert movie. The original full length audio tracks are still intact because foobar2000 did not delete the original files when it generated the files for each songs. So this brings us to the second part of the manual ripping method. I need to merge everything together into a concert movie, so I have a single MKV file of the audio and video. For this, I am using a program called 'mkvmerge GUI'. MKVmerge is the program 'Another AEC3to' uses to merge everything together during it's automated process. I am using a version of this with a nice graphical user interface (GUI). MKVmerge is part of MKVToolNix, which is a set of utilities for MKV files.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCIuDOFDjgLbZaNbUCQXfSzZ1a1OuZOvvKoBetdiW9mWWlhmTSiRdlAJjTKKUTU1ygbcFTs-u3EDR8Q9K84ZauPFlDTQMjtpiUdLV33TGXTZTdcKrMwvdHmRerNbo1Q-JDcPQoKTu2jAE/s1600/MKVMerge.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCIuDOFDjgLbZaNbUCQXfSzZ1a1OuZOvvKoBetdiW9mWWlhmTSiRdlAJjTKKUTU1ygbcFTs-u3EDR8Q9K84ZauPFlDTQMjtpiUdLV33TGXTZTdcKrMwvdHmRerNbo1Q-JDcPQoKTu2jAE/s1600/MKVMerge.JPG" height="309" width="320" /></a></div>
I've picked the 'add' button to add my audio and video files to the 'Input files' list. Using Windows Explorer you can also drag and drop these files into the 'Input files' section. As you can see above, I'm only including the multichannel FLAC file that was originally DTS-HD MA, but I could include the stereo PCM audio if I wanted both audio tracks. I don't, so I've only added the multichannel track. Next, I'm going to add the chapter file, so I can navigate from song to song (chapters) when I play the MKV with the software players on my computer. To do this, I've selected the 'Global' tab and browsed to and selected the chapter that was created with 'Another EAC3toGUI'. Before selecting the chapter file, I edited it using notepad and added the names of the songs to each chapter. The 'mkvmerge GUI' program also has a utility for editing your chapter names. Sometimes I use it to double check that I've got everything correct. To check your chapter titles, select the 'Chapter Editor' tab and drag and drop your chapter.txt file into the editor window.<br />
I could have used this editor instead of notepad, but I think notepad's a little faster.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBoTyPs4sNvmXzLlKlDEBuO9vHqELmwt8xd7_0FNmwVVkhlpBphaP5VVzh2LX0D3jCpeTrdOMCpq4fz2dV6AyQiIYUYurfUd0rBMAyW0wiYBy-DVlFiU5EaOH_7ZjEjxeAi0KcS1A_uyM/s1600/MKVMerge-chapters2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBoTyPs4sNvmXzLlKlDEBuO9vHqELmwt8xd7_0FNmwVVkhlpBphaP5VVzh2LX0D3jCpeTrdOMCpq4fz2dV6AyQiIYUYurfUd0rBMAyW0wiYBy-DVlFiU5EaOH_7ZjEjxeAi0KcS1A_uyM/s1600/MKVMerge-chapters2.JPG" height="309" width="320" /></a></div>
I can now merge everything into a single MKV file now that I've got the audio, video and chapter files selected and the output filename set to the location and desired name. Now I just pick the 'Start muxing' button and wait for it to finish.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOf4G5HLJ-14sWu9xRStG9htw2iYwh3ohZx9GDMC4omvNw9zbDr0nThAXsbPGHc0zvcaTgVY_2xow0A-P43OEaFrNTVQDJbiRw7A8jkXDyUC9AJo7xANorZMHC9qXjg_CslJ23GZqUJaw/s1600/MKVMerge-output.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOf4G5HLJ-14sWu9xRStG9htw2iYwh3ohZx9GDMC4omvNw9zbDr0nThAXsbPGHc0zvcaTgVY_2xow0A-P43OEaFrNTVQDJbiRw7A8jkXDyUC9AJo7xANorZMHC9qXjg_CslJ23GZqUJaw/s1600/MKVMerge-output.JPG" height="231" width="320" /></a></div>
It will take about 30 minutes to generate my merged MKV file. When it's finished, I can move this file to my media server and use 'My Movies', JRMC and/or WMC to add it to my movie library.<br />
<br />
Here are the links to the programs I've used during the manual method:<br />
<a href="http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=154126" target="_blank">Another EAC3toGUI-Plus info</a>. This info page includes links to all the other utilities 'Another EAC3toGUI' needs to work. This site may also provide more details than I have in this article. It should cover features that I haven't used here. Mike Eby, the author of 'AnotherEAC3toGUI, also provides a link to a user guide written by a guy named Damien called "<a href="http://www.mediasmartserver.net/2010/03/29/mkv-mania-another-eac3to-gui/" target="_blank">MKV Mania: Another EAC3to GUI</a>." Damien also provides links to everything you need.<br />
<a href="http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolnix/index.html" target="_blank">MKVToolNix</a> is the set of tools you'll need to work with MKV files, including 'MKVmerge GUI'.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>2. Automated Blu-ray Ripping</b><br />
Now for the easy method...<br />
<br />
Buy <a href="http://makemkv.com/" target="_blank">MakeMKV</a>. And NO, I don't work for them. Actually, I think they have a trial period, so you can test it before you spend any money. I think the trial is fully functioning. This is the program I use for ripping my Blu-rays most of the time. In the case of concert Blu-rays, I may use the manual method described above to get my audio tracks and then use MakeMKV to extract and create my concert movie.<br />
<br />
MakeMKV works out of the box, you don't need to download a bunch of other utilities to get it to work. You don't even need a disc decrypter like 'AnyDVD HD'. In fact, if you have it running, MakeMKV will suggest disabling it before proceeding.<br />
<br />
For this example, I'm going to rip the disc from my "Sherlock Holmes - A Game of Shadows" Blu-ray. After inserting the disc in my BD drive, I've launched MakeMKV:<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPHrNKcVGezFVn1Bfaz8hhC5MyOHpybP31bUyEk3Ud39V_e7yKZK0wZL8SEyQ43LVDQb7CrBzJ40gY4evyMMN8jYKw3lE0rU9gPg7nbr81tcr-AQTG6cgpvO05rWOUG4QABpi5u4jrt4E/s1600/MakeMKV1.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPHrNKcVGezFVn1Bfaz8hhC5MyOHpybP31bUyEk3Ud39V_e7yKZK0wZL8SEyQ43LVDQb7CrBzJ40gY4evyMMN8jYKw3lE0rU9gPg7nbr81tcr-AQTG6cgpvO05rWOUG4QABpi5u4jrt4E/s1600/MakeMKV1.JPG" height="275" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
First, I make sure it is set to my BD drive and then I pick the Blu-ray icon near the middle of the screen. The program analyzes the disc and displays a list of all the titles.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8NwsvQKNxU3MV4ikRb_aQiUi-4BMt75jFy0Zh3HPtK-mR2xzdnNBQxh9yEGIqw3phQq-e22VHDe2QlHqfZ95vAn-wjGgsaXTglcSN2VmMJCzgHDZTr1nMIZjckZ9yL65i-OI-KIfxm7s/s1600/MakeMKV2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8NwsvQKNxU3MV4ikRb_aQiUi-4BMt75jFy0Zh3HPtK-mR2xzdnNBQxh9yEGIqw3phQq-e22VHDe2QlHqfZ95vAn-wjGgsaXTglcSN2VmMJCzgHDZTr1nMIZjckZ9yL65i-OI-KIfxm7s/s1600/MakeMKV2.JPG" height="275" width="320" /></a></div>
The results show there are quite a few titles. Normally, with most movies, it's pretty obvious which title is the main feature. It's usually the largest sized title. With TV series discs, it's not quite as easy. Unfortunately, MakeMKV doesn't have any way to preview these titles. In this case one of the titles is identified as the main feature (that's not necessarily the case with all Blu-rays), so I'm going to deselect the other titles since I only want to create one MKV movie file. I've clicked on the little triangular icon to expand the tree. This will show all the components included with the titles, such as the audio tracks and subtitles.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfrE27YbcAm_ncsHCxIq0666NubrCMTOzdzQE03zN2H3LD9lbdSukg12tJdevw5lWZr6DIgikTKKL_v07uCbBxJPdUuSdcvYCJBKTRXUYps-077bAyIvg-8K8rLZ6kQrSAuooJ3l6l0mI/s1600/MakeMKV3.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfrE27YbcAm_ncsHCxIq0666NubrCMTOzdzQE03zN2H3LD9lbdSukg12tJdevw5lWZr6DIgikTKKL_v07uCbBxJPdUuSdcvYCJBKTRXUYps-077bAyIvg-8K8rLZ6kQrSAuooJ3l6l0mI/s1600/MakeMKV3.JPG" height="275" width="320" /></a></div>
I've removed the checkbox from everything except the high resolution DTS-HD MA track and the English subtitles. I've selected both the English subtitles and the English forced subtitles. By checking the 'forced only' branch, it will only included the forced subtitles. Normally I don't want all the subtitles of an English movie. However, some English movies will have foreign dialog, like the movie "Argo," and with forced only checked I will get subtitles when they are speaking Farsi. You can also see that the DTS-HD MA track is going to be converted to FLAC. That's because I'm using the FLAC profile. If I change the profile to 'Default' it will not convert the DTS-HD MA track and both the audio and video will be in their original formats. Once all my programs, JRMC, MPC-HC and WMC were capable of using the LAV filters, I've been able to play the original DTS-HD MA tracks. So I really don't need to use the FLAC profile. Next, I'm going to pick the 'Make MKV' button to rip and generate my MKV movie.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9ZRf3yWeRJ2ZiGZEoewpFK0kXf-kaKRQbjZ5jG3d06bNiPfb_qFVXFv20u4CEW1YcDKOfQ-5mwt3UHauW-VRzyrZtAP2OJKjdg0khc70DvAr53EiTwPEZg6eJoi1M_bEdQINOdNGO-v8/s1600/MakeMKV4.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9ZRf3yWeRJ2ZiGZEoewpFK0kXf-kaKRQbjZ5jG3d06bNiPfb_qFVXFv20u4CEW1YcDKOfQ-5mwt3UHauW-VRzyrZtAP2OJKjdg0khc70DvAr53EiTwPEZg6eJoi1M_bEdQINOdNGO-v8/s1600/MakeMKV4.JPG" height="275" width="320" /></a></div>
That's it! After about 30 or 45 minutes, I'll have my MKV file and I can move it to my server and add it to my movie library. As you can see, that's a much simpler method than the manual method described above. However, you can't extract just the audio by itself. MakeMKV will only create a complete A/V movie file. You could open the resulting MKV file with 'MKVExtractGUI2', which is one of the tools included with MKVToolNix. Then you could extract the audio and chapter files, and follow the steps in the manual method above for creating the cue file and splitting out the tracks.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script></div>Gregg Plummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04797151841680024732noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1200537834385264967.post-86245513641087619082014-02-11T15:19:00.001-06:002014-02-13T22:44:34.793-06:00Playing and Ripping SACDs with your PCNote: I started writing this post back in August of 2012. I just never got around to publishing it at the time. I start by providing a little background information and end with what I think is the latest and best method. However, I haven't checked for newer versions or methods for well over a year, so there might be better methods out there. Please leave a comment if you know if there's a better method.<br />
<br />
I've wanted to rip and play SACDs with my computer for a long time. Since I didn't own a dedicated SACD or even universal CD/DVD/SACD player, I hadn't been able to play a SACD disc until recently. As far as I know, the sound quality from a SACD is very similar to DVD-Audio, but there seems to be a lot more content available on SACD, so the ability to play the tracks from a SACD disc became one of my goals. Since I store my music on my media server and stream it via several PCs attached to my home network, I prefer to rip all my content off the discs. I don't want to purchase another piece of hardware and add to the chain of equipment to play another format. Maybe this is another sign that I'm getting old. When I was a teen, I thought having a rack of hardware with lots of flashing LEDs was pretty cool, not so much now. Besides, I think more components added to a very good audio system can compromise the overall sound quality.<br />
<br />
A few years ago (I don't know the exact time frame or dates) some very technically savvy people started working on ripping SACDs. Unlike ripping normal DVDs and CDs, this seemed impossible. You couldn't purchase a SACD drive for your PC and even though it turns out a SACD drive is really a DVD drive with different firmware that allows it to read the DSD data format, you couldn't just replace the DVD's firmware to make it work with SACDs. The best you could do was record the analog audio output from a SACD player into your computer using a soundcard with analog inputs. With a high quality professional soundcard or audio interface, you could get pretty good results. So someone with a multichannel device with decent ADCs (analog-to-digital converter) could connect the analog inputs of their multichannel interface to the analog outputs of their SACD player. The resulting 24-bit/96KHz or higher resolution tracks sounded pretty good. In my opinion, these were a step above a meticulously ripped vinyl recording. However, they still needed an analog-to-digital conversion step. And depending on your SACD player, they might already have gone through another conversion step from DSD to PCM. If they used a mediocre SACD player, the results were not so great, so you also needed a pretty high end player.<br />
<br />
Maybe I should back up a bit and try to explain the difference between DSD and PCM. Forget it... that's not important here. If you want to know more about this, just read the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Audio_CD" target="_blank">Wikipedia article</a>. This article also includes links to Sony technical documents and other FAQs.<br />
<br />
Even though the analog rips of the SACD were pretty good, these technically savvy folks continued working on ways to digitally rip their SACDs. Their goal was to generate a track without going through the analog-to-digital step. Sometime around the middle to end of 2009, a person with the pseudonym "HiResOrNothing" explained how they developed their new "standard" for SACD ripping:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"We can now capture a pure 24-bit PCM digital signal which is converted directly from the pure DSD stream from the disc - and this is achieved by using a special "modified" SACD player. These modified players have been around ever since the SACD format has, but they have always been extremely expensive (like, try a $2000 Denon player which you have to order from Switzerland). But things have progressed and a few companies are offering a modified version of the famous Oppo DV-980H player, which is well known for its affordability yet uncompromised quality - especially with regards to digital SACD output!" </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"I have purchased such a player. The Oppo offers pure DSD output over HDMI 1.2 and it also gives the option for PCM output. The Oppo internally converts the DSD to PCM at 24-bit/88.2kHz and the "mod" captures this PCM signal and outputs it through three stereo S/PDIF (coaxial) jacks. To capture this glorious digital signal, I am using three M-Audio Delta 1010LT sound cards simultaneously. They each have a single stereo coaxial input, so in order to record all six channels simultaneously, three cards must be used. I'm using Adobe Audition 1.5 in multitrack mode to simultaneously record the 6 channels in real time, then I map the channels with Audition's "multichannel encoder", and export the individual mono wav channels. After that I split the album into the tracks and encode it to MLP with surcode, and author it to DVD-A with Discwelder Chrome. No editing of the audio signal is made in Adobe Audition, this is a straight digital capture of the signal and as close as you can get to copying a SACD disc-to-disc at the present time."</blockquote>
So if you come across a SACD rip and find it offered as 24-bit/96KHz tracks, there's a good chance it's an analog rip. If you find 24-bit/88.2KHz tracks, it's probably a digital rip. Maybe some of the commercial high resolution download sites, like <a href="https://www.hdtracks.com/" target="_blank">HDTracks</a>, are using a similar digital rip technique for some of their 24-bit/88.2KHz offerings. I think I've seen some 88.2KHz tracks there.<br />
<br />
The next goal was to figure out a way to rip and play back the DSD format files. This would be the ideal method for listening to your SACD generated files on your computer or home network. However, to get the full benefits, you'd need a DSD capable DAC and a software player that can handle the DSD format. Most DACs (and as mentioned earlier in this post, many universal/SACD players), mine included, that say they are DSD capable actually convert the DSD to PCM internally before outputting the analog signal. Some, like the ESS Sabre32 DACs, I believe can convert to analog without the intermediate PCM step. When you listen to one of these DACs, you're listening to the DSD format. I personally don't have very much experience with this because I don't have a ESS Sabre32 DAC, so I don't know how different the pure DSD sounds compared to the sound of PCM after converted from DSD. Here's a <a href="http://supratekaudio.blogspot.com/2012/06/dsd-pcm.html" target="_blank">post with an opinion</a> on this subject. Fortunately, my favorite software player, J.River Media Center, can handle the DSD format, so I'm all set there.<br />
<br />
Moving forward, early 2012, someone finally figured out how to rip and save the DSD formated file from a SACD and published "Ted's SACD Ripping (and PCM Conversion - optional) Primer - Version 2.0.4." I think the latest version of this primer is 2.3.2, but I can't find it anywhere. Maybe ask Ted, whoever he is. This method describes basically a two step process. First, you use a Sony PS3 to save a disc copy of the SACD to an ISO file. Second, after copying the ISO file to your computer, you use a program to extract the DSD from the ISO and save each track as DSF files.<br />
<br />
The first part only works with a Sony PS3 that can play SACD discs. Before you can do anything, the firmware has to be hacked to support ripping. This will only work if the PS3 player has the firmware 3.55 or older. Apparently, there are only 4 PS3 models with this capability. If you can find one of these (good luck), then you have to hack the player. Hacking the firmware involves installing a revised version of the firmware. Once the new revised firmware is running, you can install the SACD ripping software. Once you have a hacked PS3 with the SACD ripping software installed, you can start ripping your SACD collection. Older versions of the ripping program could extract individual files or an ISO disc image. Because of slow ripping speeds and to avoid wear and tear on the PS3's optical drive, they recommend extracting the full ISO image and thus newer versions of the ripping software only supports ISO extraction. To rip a SACD disc, you use your game controller to navigate to the games section of your PS3 menu, then pick "Unknown" and then "SACD-ripper". Next, you insert your SACD into the PS3's optical drive and a USB thumb drive, with enough storage space, into one of the USB ports. After picking "OK" ("X" button), it will start ripping and eventually store the ISO file on your thumb drive. Personally, I've never done this, because I don't own a PS3 player. However, I was lucky to find a friend who owned one and was willing to run the hack. Now I buy the SACD discs and send them to him and he creates the ISO files for me. For ISO files smaller than 2 GB, he can transfer them over the Internet using a service called <a href="https://www.wetransfer.com/" target="_blank">We Transfer</a>. If it's larger, which it usually is, he'll burn it to a DVD-R disc and send it in the mail. I wish I could find a compatible PS3 player, but they are almost impossible to find. Maybe more will show up on eBay now that the PS4 is shipping.<br />
<br />
The second part involves running another SACD extraction program on your PC. First, you have to install 'sacd_extract.exe' on your computer. Here are the steps I follow to extract the DSF files for each track:<br />
<br />
<ol>
<li>Copy the ISO from my thumb drive (or DVD-R) to the same folder where sacd_extract.exe is located on my PC, which I'll call the rip folder.</li>
<li> navigate to the rip folder and SHIFT-right click on the folder and select "open command window here."</li>
<li>at the command prompt, type "sacd_extract" (without the quotes), followed by the arguments you want to apply to the output files. </li>
</ol>
<div>
The command format is: sacd_extract [options] [sourcefile]. I always generate DSF files and depending on the SACD, I can generate stereo and/or multichannel surround files, if they exist. For example, I have Bob Dylan's 'Blood on the Tracks' SACD, which has both stereo and multichannel surround tracks. Assume the ISO from the PS3 rip is 'BloodontheTracks.iso'. To extract the stereo tracks, I typed:</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
sacd_extract -2 -s -c -i"BloodontheTracks.iso"</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
if I want the multichannel surround tracks, I type:</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
sacd_extract -m -s -c -i"BloodontheTracks.iso"</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
These will create a new folder named 'Bob Dylan - Blood On The Tracks' with each individual track in the format 'tracknumber - trackname.dsf' (for the first track, this would be "01 - Tangled Up in Blue.dsf"). It will create exactly the same names for both the stereo and multichannel, so if I want both, I will rename the folder to something else to avoid overwriting the stereo with the multichannel tracks. Then I move the folders to my networked server and add it to my music library using JRMC v19 (J.River Media Center). I chose DSF files because they can be tagged with metadata. So when I add them to my library, I make sure all the tags are correct.</div>
<br />
<br />
That's it!! Now I can enjoy listening to my SACDs using my computers and my media server. Again, I don't have a DSD capable DAC, so even though JRMC19 can handle the DSF file format, it automatically converts to PCM before it is sent to my DAC. So I'm still not listening to the pure DSD format, but it still sounds really good. And when or if I ever get a DSD capable DAC, I have these in the correct format and I'll be able to listen to them without the PCM conversion.<br />
<br /><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script></div>Gregg Plummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04797151841680024732noreply@blogger.com28tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1200537834385264967.post-20213457932713720892013-11-02T15:12:00.000-05:002013-11-02T15:15:07.012-05:00More Audio Gadget HistoryThis is for those of you that enjoyed my post titled <a href="http://amplioaudio.blogspot.com/2007/05/short-history-of-audiovideo-technology.html" target="_blank">The Short History of Audio/Video Technology</a>. <a href="http://popchartlab.com/products/the-advance-of-audio-apparatuses" target="_blank">The Advance of Audio Apparatuses</a> is a poster that shows pictures of audio gadgets from 1840 to the present. I don't think it's representative of the most significant audio inventions, but it gives you a pretty good overview. Of the whole chart, I think I've owned only 2 of the illustrated gadgets - the Sony Walkman and the Sony Discman. Although, I did buy my daughter's iPod Touch and iPhones.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script></div>Gregg Plummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04797151841680024732noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1200537834385264967.post-9396802719578617112012-05-17T13:02:00.000-05:002014-02-13T22:45:32.779-06:00Ripping DVD-Audio with DVD Audio ExtractorIn an earlier post I explained how to rip a DVD-Audio disc using foobar2000 and a couple foobar plug-ins. In this post I'll explain a slightly easier method using a program called DVD Audio Extractor.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.dvdae.com/" target="_blank">DVD Audio Extractor</a> is an application that I originally used to extract the audio tracks from a video DVD. Also in an earlier post, I explained how to extract the audio from a Diana Krall DVD. You use the same technique to get the audio from a DVD-Audio disc. The application works like a wizard and steps you through the process. <br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKhIrZ7ENce_sokJdCGGCx4JCxIOaR7QiePyQ9WTLrQWG2Lz7Sao0soFYv0D30i6zDzk5e8KVXEp2bWrqcPQSViSvheQgXxjvkZUnqdSGsGztGA70jl8ojpJu8Gm86WuEcuIT9bGMOlAY/s1600/main+screen.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKhIrZ7ENce_sokJdCGGCx4JCxIOaR7QiePyQ9WTLrQWG2Lz7Sao0soFYv0D30i6zDzk5e8KVXEp2bWrqcPQSViSvheQgXxjvkZUnqdSGsGztGA70jl8ojpJu8Gm86WuEcuIT9bGMOlAY/s320/main+screen.JPG" height="206" width="320" /></a></div>
I'm working with DVD Audio Extractor version 6.3.0, which is the most current version at this time (May/2012). Here's what the first screen looks like:<br />
<br />
Before I launched DVD Audio Extractor, I already had the DVD disc in my
drive and by default, it displayed the contents of the AUDIO_TS folder. You
can use the drop-down navigation tools to get to the VIDEO_TS folder. The volume label is shown in the album field. In this case, it says BARENAKEDEVERYTHING, which is the volume label for my 'Barenaked Ladies - Everything to Everyone' disc. The DVD was part of a CD/DVD combo pack I bought many years ago. The DVD disc also includes a DVD Video with in-studio video clips of 11 acoustic songs. <br />
<br />
First, let me explain the program's layout. It should be pretty self explanatory, so I'll just provide a simple overview. Below the source selection drop-down is a row for entering the metadata, which includes the artist, album, year and genre. Below that, there are 2 windows. The one on the left is a list of titles included in the disc. On the right are all the chapters in that title. When you pick on one of the titles, the message box below the title window will show the audio format usually with sample rate, bit depth and the number of channels. With this disc, there are 5 titles, 2 of these have 14 chapters, 2 have 1 chapter and 1 title has 11 chapters. I can see that the titles with 14 chapters (Title1 and Title2), all of their chapter lengths match, so they're probably the same songs. The difference is Title1 has 6 channel tracks (5.1 surround) and Title2 is in stereo. It looks like Title3 and Title4 are the 5.1 channel and stereo versions of a bonus track and Title5 is the same 11 acoustic songs from their studio session that are offered in the VIDEO_TS folder. I'm going to extract the surround tracks from Title1 and Title3. These are all 24-bit, 96 KHz, 6 channel tracks.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1G3JtWFM9pCQeB2to6ItnuPs4PNTnpRm4QROkLaNebr-MBDeNgx6t0YQdvfO1zroj5k85_TmVihelvpkvLDXpKKNW6KMd_W9jVrHnjikzuICe00n-dljrf9qW7vqb6QEnewvfQL2AGDY/s1600/metadata+entered.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1G3JtWFM9pCQeB2to6ItnuPs4PNTnpRm4QROkLaNebr-MBDeNgx6t0YQdvfO1zroj5k85_TmVihelvpkvLDXpKKNW6KMd_W9jVrHnjikzuICe00n-dljrf9qW7vqb6QEnewvfQL2AGDY/s320/metadata+entered.JPG" height="206" width="320" /></a></div>
First, I'll need to enter the metadata. I tried picking the pencil icon on the far right side of the metadata toolbar to see if I could automatically download the information for artist, album and track names, but it returned "no match found" so unfortunately, I'll have to enter this in manually. So using the info on the back of the jewel box, this is what it looks like after editing.<br />
<br />
After entering the artist, album, year, genre and track names, I'm ready to go to the next step, so I picked the 'Next >' button at the bottom of the app's window. The program displays a message saying "Scanning chapters, please wait..." Hmmm, this is taking quite a long time and my computer has a Intel Core i3 540 (3 GHz quad core) and 4 GB RAM running Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit. This step didn't take very long with a video DVD, but it is pretty slow with this disc.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlO5__W-PmFFW5ro8lium2W8cpCdE2FPqlIIQAP0ToVKeGQe1f2OGoMwU2n82hb7Jupb5SWDtKVnJI4gKbq9KQh2G9qtY3T-CVOPj5sqgnmnc0vLqfrg509Ll_QWlBUbWVWG59iJaKOk8/s1600/Output+format.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlO5__W-PmFFW5ro8lium2W8cpCdE2FPqlIIQAP0ToVKeGQe1f2OGoMwU2n82hb7Jupb5SWDtKVnJI4gKbq9KQh2G9qtY3T-CVOPj5sqgnmnc0vLqfrg509Ll_QWlBUbWVWG59iJaKOk8/s320/Output+format.JPG" height="200" width="320" /></a></div>
The second screen includes the output format and codec options. For this disc, I'm going to convert (transcode) the MLP tracks to FLAC. Since both are lossless, they will sound identical and FLAC has the added advantage of being supported by virtually every player and it supports tagging, which I'm not sure is possible with MLP. Since I want to convert from MLP to FLAC without any changes, I set the sample rate to "same as input", the channels to "all 6 channels" and bits per sample to "24 bits", which matches the bit depth of the original MLP.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhE-hpCpeFi_erygkKNrgTDfP3QgAx1nKYtpvRolM3eoyfO4RkUyBMPMQr4qXmnKp-r7KVTP4KMdDIeghg-fzLgGUPWs7CqD3dQI-9mlSQ2Yo2WzjF2M31SQ5CO9R8yKmQhpwaRLUde7nY/s1600/Output+location.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhE-hpCpeFi_erygkKNrgTDfP3QgAx1nKYtpvRolM3eoyfO4RkUyBMPMQr4qXmnKp-r7KVTP4KMdDIeghg-fzLgGUPWs7CqD3dQI-9mlSQ2Yo2WzjF2M31SQ5CO9R8yKmQhpwaRLUde7nY/s320/Output+location.JPG" height="200" width="320" /></a></div>
Picking the 'Next >' button again will take us to the next screen, which is used to specify the location for your files. It can automatically create folders using the metadata fields I completed in the first screen. I'm going to use the metadata from 'Artist' and 'Album' to create an artist folder and an album subfolder. Each track will be placed in the album folder and the names will have the track number followed by the track name. With DVD Audio Extractor the track number comes from the INDEX data and the track name is the same as the CHAPTER name. This information was included in their help file, which you can see if you pick the 'HELP' button in the lower left corner. Since I am not making any changes, other than the basic conversion from MLP to FLAC, I will not do any normalization. <br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKUnH0WaFJUdQPbMJdqwkRUxqx2BYL8Sr-CMxMm-iY0suDbjQvOEuMVWpS2JmUR3EPdy0YyM7dOCs3xEm95hdeTxCdnGHggsRK1CZbUkOQeK0nBrWtQk0OSCk2B2aMYHnsYsdpep88kmo/s1600/encoding.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKUnH0WaFJUdQPbMJdqwkRUxqx2BYL8Sr-CMxMm-iY0suDbjQvOEuMVWpS2JmUR3EPdy0YyM7dOCs3xEm95hdeTxCdnGHggsRK1CZbUkOQeK0nBrWtQk0OSCk2B2aMYHnsYsdpep88kmo/s320/encoding.JPG" height="200" width="320" /></a></div>
Picking 'Next>' takes us to our final step, which shows the progress of extracting and encoding. I picked the 'Start' button to make it run. This screen shows a snapshot of what it looks like while in the process of extracting and encoding. Upon completion, DVD Audio Extractor will pop-up a message to tell you the encoding finished with a link to the folder where your extracted tracks are located. That's it!<br />
<br />
In conclusion, DVD Audio Extractor works and it's an easier method than the process I explained for extracting DVD-Audio tracks using foobar2000. However, I think foobar2000, once set up with the correct plug-ins, is pretty easy and is a lot faster. I waited at least 15 minutes between the first and second steps with DVD Audio Extractor.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script></div>Gregg Plummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04797151841680024732noreply@blogger.com4Madison, WI 53726, USA43.100982876188546 -89.4067382812541.628854876188548 -91.93359378125 44.573110876188544 -86.87988278125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1200537834385264967.post-19186815350575761892012-05-17T08:39:00.000-05:002012-05-17T09:19:39.404-05:00Updates and editsI tried to change the layout of the blog posts. I'm also trying to remove some of the out-dated crap that I don't really need. Does anyone even use 'DIGGIT!', 'DEL.ICIO.US', 'FURL', 'SIMPY', and 'SPURL'? Of those, the only one I'm really familiar with is DEL.ICIO.US. I have never used any of the others. Besides, I don't really understand why they're needed with a blog post.<br />
<br />
If you know why they might be useful, please let me know and I'll consider keeping them.<br />
<br />
Even if I decide to get rid of them, I can't figure out how. They don't appear in any of the blog layout/edit screens. Any help here would be greatly appreciated.<br />
<br />
UPDATE: After failing to figure out how to get rid of the buttons for 'DIGGIT!', 'DEL.ICIO.US', 'FURL', 'SIMPY', and 'SPURL', I tried using a different template. This seems to have worked. I'm not sure if I like the design, but I think it should work as a temporary solution until I have time to go and mess it up with different colors, widths, etc.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script></div>Gregg Plummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04797151841680024732noreply@blogger.com0Madison, WI 53726, USA43.073051 -89.4012341.588479 -91.9280855 44.557623 -86.8743745tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1200537834385264967.post-10743022475492356282011-05-04T16:14:00.004-05:002011-05-05T10:36:48.568-05:00Anyone reading this blog?Hey, it's been over a year since I posted anything. Is anyone still reading this?? If so, leave a comment.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script></div>Gregg Plummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04797151841680024732noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1200537834385264967.post-11294876111670883712010-04-23T16:51:00.004-05:002010-04-25T20:34:36.580-05:00New Software Can Transcribe Music from any SourceHere's an interesting <a href="http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-04/new-computer-can-translate-sounds-sheet-music" target="_blank">article</a> about software created by a team of Spanish engineers that can generate sheet music from a recording. If I'm understanding this correctly, their software first creates a spectral pattern, used to identify individual instruments and then it can determine which note is played. Pretty cool. I wonder how it works with percussion instruments, like a set of drums.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script></div>Gregg Plummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04797151841680024732noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1200537834385264967.post-42967728804545506622010-02-24T12:29:00.011-06:002010-02-24T15:14:30.679-06:00Extracting Audio from DVD-VideoI own a handful of concert DVDs that include music that I'd like to add to my music library and listen to without having to play the video. Luckily, I recently discovered a really handy utility called <a href="http://castudio.org/dvdaudioextractor/" target="_blank">DVD Audio Extractor</a> that lets me extract audio from a DVD Video almost as easy as ripping a CD. I'll show you how I extracted the audio from my '<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00005Y3ZM/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_1?pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=B00006J9OT&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=1M4A7F0KFFBPP2WY5XKM" target="_blank">Diana Krall - Live in Paris</a>' DVD Video.<br /><br />After inserting the disc into my DVD drive, I opened DVD Audio Extractor. Here's the main interface:<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEie2ur3DqkxlQ2rS0KIAh7Doy5XYbiZABVGPSSKUQ9u_U8XUrWpyFVL_An-Do6rSyyWYCFpb5IqT1KZbgsmkcNzmvYYHNhPX3jq1-LQkbKqmqRhqEaCoMZtyxpDdHw5Gvyirp4icEs5WgY/s1600-h/DVDAext1.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 270px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEie2ur3DqkxlQ2rS0KIAh7Doy5XYbiZABVGPSSKUQ9u_U8XUrWpyFVL_An-Do6rSyyWYCFpb5IqT1KZbgsmkcNzmvYYHNhPX3jq1-LQkbKqmqRhqEaCoMZtyxpDdHw5Gvyirp4icEs5WgY/s320/DVDAext1.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5441883909292931474" border="0" /></a><br />DVD Audio Extractor displays all the title sets and chapters. Usually the main concert tracks will be in the title set with the largest duration. The shorter title sets are usually extras or special clips. In the main window it shows the list of chapters. These are usually the music tracks from the concert. To verify the correct title set and chapters, you can select something and hit the play button. DVD Audio Extractor will play the chapter in the main window and you can watch and listen to the video.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHTDCGAyXQ6NUv5nT6AjnNN3T7IRrLfE8zh0Ka2VBeX9f11XcVbXizD4is-vDAeAfyC2nh2YK4ig4G52REq_EjtWEHY5JLFtJJ4zUTVeFvFw5dwM9lk4FLSZJjixWKsE20fx_VokjWZTI/s1600-h/DVDAext2.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 270px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHTDCGAyXQ6NUv5nT6AjnNN3T7IRrLfE8zh0Ka2VBeX9f11XcVbXizD4is-vDAeAfyC2nh2YK4ig4G52REq_EjtWEHY5JLFtJJ4zUTVeFvFw5dwM9lk4FLSZJjixWKsE20fx_VokjWZTI/s320/DVDAext2.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5441886281684645506" border="0" /></a><br />The program also lists all the audio streams for each title set. In this example, you can see both stereo and 6 channel AC3 (Dolby Digital) streams and a 5 channel DTS stream. Sometimes the video will include a higher resolution stereo PCM stream, but that's not the case here. The AC3 and DTS multichannel streams are almost always 16-bit, 48 kHz. Since I'm a bit of an audio purist, I don't normally store lossy encoded audio in my library. I usually rip everything to lossless FLAC or WMA. However, I will make an exception for surround tracks and rip the occasional DTS audio. I prefer DTS over AC3 because it is compressed at a higher bit rate and usually sounds better.<br /><br />Next, I'll edit the chapter names so they show the name of the songs on the DVD. I just referred to the back cover of the DVD case for the list of songs. This is what it looked like after I edited the chapter names:<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuyX-62eot_ODjvRTEIVKvPL2Fh9DxoI_Zq03Afwk9d-vKAlMMJrwpx90r3n0Fmni7IFii9p2X4DYHBXeELzYecI_aZA2CMxrpncNndndwizquqzr-AGRuQeDi4YtgBEpuqlUFxKFRBPo/s1600-h/DVDAext3.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 270px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuyX-62eot_ODjvRTEIVKvPL2Fh9DxoI_Zq03Afwk9d-vKAlMMJrwpx90r3n0Fmni7IFii9p2X4DYHBXeELzYecI_aZA2CMxrpncNndndwizquqzr-AGRuQeDi4YtgBEpuqlUFxKFRBPo/s320/DVDAext3.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5441893507183539906" border="0" /></a>Once you've made these edits, you need to select all the chapters/tracks you want to extract. I also found some bonus material in Title5 and after previewing was able to figure out that it was the rehearsal footage for 3 songs. Since it was also 5ch DTS audio, I decided to include it in my selection. Picking the 'Next' button will take you to the next step. In this window you select the output audio format. You can choose between lossy compression formats like OGG or mp3 and lossless FLAC compression. There's also an option for uncompressed WAV and Direct Stream Demux.<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9RvBWFD6xlrjvtmtaK_eIM5Ywsn-jHGKqN1-g8o5SoVl6HmBs31WOjHmgXSDFWHp70DNeR_CNVna8OVFCyNqYfvHp4VHotjqcEYJdoaOeAA7lFfabHMaud0cAbmBRuZF7E6U1rpYLk0c/s1600-h/DVDAext4.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 270px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9RvBWFD6xlrjvtmtaK_eIM5Ywsn-jHGKqN1-g8o5SoVl6HmBs31WOjHmgXSDFWHp70DNeR_CNVna8OVFCyNqYfvHp4VHotjqcEYJdoaOeAA7lFfabHMaud0cAbmBRuZF7E6U1rpYLk0c/s320/DVDAext4.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5441901010116562098" border="0" /></a>I was a little confused by the options for 'Channels'. With FLAC (and WAV), I noticed you can choose between mono, stereo and 'All 6 Channels'. However, in the previous screen, the DTS audio stream was listed as DTS (48kHz 5CH). So I thought it would show 5 channels instead of 6 channels. Maybe this is just an error in their interface and they always have 'All 6 Channels' for all surround streams. Or, maybe they automatically upmix to 6 channels or add a silent Lfe (low frequency effects or subwoofer) channel. In my opinion, that's not a good thing to do because you are just increasing the file size with dummy data. I decided to try extracting a single track using the 'Direct Stream Demux' method. This will copy the audio stream directly without decoding so the output is exactly the same as the source. DTS audio is saved to a *.dts file. I can open it with foobar2000 and check the number of channels.<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBT01nRy6NrdQ5ieoVZ9KX2WulAJsneJFdCJVMi8vZvoHAkYcQU8a5E0zsCqjpc9qgzsNVTumXNj41zLx_aAsTVr9XowMuZktCHGqZaphOQICPJftava233GxllbSoE3t6FxQRNM4Qexc/s1600-h/DVDAext5.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 270px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBT01nRy6NrdQ5ieoVZ9KX2WulAJsneJFdCJVMi8vZvoHAkYcQU8a5E0zsCqjpc9qgzsNVTumXNj41zLx_aAsTVr9XowMuZktCHGqZaphOQICPJftava233GxllbSoE3t6FxQRNM4Qexc/s320/DVDAext5.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5441904305456081378" border="0" /></a>As it turns out, the audio stream does have 6 channels. So I don't know why it was listed as DTS (48kHz 5CH). The DVD sleeve says it includes DTS 5.1, so I'll just assume the audio stream list is inaccurate. After determining the correct settings, I went back and selected all my chapters/tracks and set it to FLAC with the sample rate set to 'Same as input', channels to 'All 6 Channels' (afterall, the main reason for ripping this is to get the surround tracks) and the 'Bits per sample' to 16 bits. You can change these settings to downmix to stereo or upsample to 24-bit, but I want to keep it as close to the source to avoid adding any distortion. Note that by encoding to FLAC from DTS, I will end up with a larger file size because I will be going from a lossy compressed format to a lossless compressed format, which is always larger. Normally I wouldn't want to do this, but since the DTS format doesn't support metadata tagging, I am going to use FLAC. Using another lossy format like 5.1 OGG, would potentially add more distortion by putting the audio through another compression stage. Since storage space is pretty cheap, I'm going to go with the larger file size. Picking 'Next' takes me to the next step which lets me target the location of my output, save each chapter as a separate file and tag the files with artist and album names.<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUSQEVC1LXLrkakAYV8LbEdjOPngIvCMlbzg34VNCcswycrtPb6B3vHQ5WIuHfnAxKK_lnNN0xeJtfqKAS4jDbWHu5KNMJKFq91cpW85iJ1hiZ9jV6cPD0EaFHtD7Yxnuijr9LAzWne1I/s1600-h/DVDAext6.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 270px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUSQEVC1LXLrkakAYV8LbEdjOPngIvCMlbzg34VNCcswycrtPb6B3vHQ5WIuHfnAxKK_lnNN0xeJtfqKAS4jDbWHu5KNMJKFq91cpW85iJ1hiZ9jV6cPD0EaFHtD7Yxnuijr9LAzWne1I/s320/DVDAext6.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5441911496802478610" border="0" /></a>The next step will take you to the final screen where you can start extracting the audio:<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqBGmdGCatv720KN4yIDQSZEN1FgkA8JYLcpT-6MYtawlMsVtQrxYgFtyaLce661Wg7OxaGghAKh06ho3epDspdNAyAMFgjOy8GaNvq9s2ggTbGobSQS6yL-TejGraN8hRyrBm6Z3le7E/s1600-h/DVDAext7.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 270px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqBGmdGCatv720KN4yIDQSZEN1FgkA8JYLcpT-6MYtawlMsVtQrxYgFtyaLce661Wg7OxaGghAKh06ho3epDspdNAyAMFgjOy8GaNvq9s2ggTbGobSQS6yL-TejGraN8hRyrBm6Z3le7E/s320/DVDAext7.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5441914384450722434" border="0" /></a>Now I can add these tracks to my music library. That's it. Let me know if you have any questions or if you've found a better method.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script></div>Gregg Plummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04797151841680024732noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1200537834385264967.post-35058200847714415932010-01-29T16:46:00.002-06:002010-01-29T23:16:46.977-06:00Playing HDCD in Full Resolution<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCMXkaJE0PibnJef5OYtM5scUTq5u9Ykc9b8RzNCwmf4YEdDZNvsXfVQx2HYqtdrdWcIGhoQ5974Ca805CmeAW2PDOHMdVqfzQqvzUCc9tS-Q37_oEgRcJSqjWMahXs1nqceZ51Dj1Ne8/s1600-h/1000px-HDCD_logo.svg.png"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 99px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCMXkaJE0PibnJef5OYtM5scUTq5u9Ykc9b8RzNCwmf4YEdDZNvsXfVQx2HYqtdrdWcIGhoQ5974Ca805CmeAW2PDOHMdVqfzQqvzUCc9tS-Q37_oEgRcJSqjWMahXs1nqceZ51Dj1Ne8/s320/1000px-HDCD_logo.svg.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5432269250131158578" border="0" /></a>Do you recognize this logo on the left? You may see it on the back cover of some of your CDs. This means your CD has <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDCD" target="_blank">High Definition Compatible Digital</a> (or HDCD) information encoded in the disc. HDCD is an encode-decode process that improves the sound quality of HDCD-encoded CDs. If you play the HDCD disc in a CD player that includes the HDCD decoder, the audio is played back at 20-bit 44.1kHz. These CDs are also backward compatible with a regular CD that uses the standard Redbook CD specification (which is any CD that will play in a CD player). So when you play an HDCD disc in a regular CD player, it plays just like any other CD at 16-bit 44.1kHz.<br /><br />I'm not sure exactly why these discs sound better. According to the wikipedia article for HDCD, it could be due to the mastering engineers taking advantage of 4 more bits of dynamic range and digital interpolation filtering which results in a more natural, open, and accurate sound reproduction. I think the engineers that take advantage of HDCD are probably more careful when mastering, use less compression, and are concerned about overall sound quality, just like they are when mastering for vinyl, SACD or DVD-Audio.<br /><br />The only way to take advantage of HDCD with a PC was to play the physical disc with Windows Media Player. Microsoft actually bought the developer of HDCD technology, Pacific Microsonics, and all their intellectual property, in 2000. If you ripped your HDCD disc to your computer's hard drive (or media server), the audio would not play back at the higher resolution. It would just play back as a regular 16-bit 44.1kHz CD.<br /><br />I recently discovered that you could use a combination of tools to convert HDCD encoded audio files into a higher resolution and take advantage of the higher quality recordings. It's important that your ripped CDs are exactly the same as the original CD. If they are compressed using a lossy format like MP3, this will not work. If you use lossless compression like FLAC or lossless WMA, it should work. One method is to use the custom little decoder program '<a href="http://forum.doom9.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=7519&d=1187729700" target="_blank">hdcd.exe</a>'. This little tool will input the 16-bit WAV data and if it finds the embedded HDCD info, it will upconvert it to 24-bits. The last 4 bits of this 24-bit file are empty, so your DAC just sees it as a 20-bit file. For more information on how to use this command line utility read this <a href="http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=129136" target="_blank">thread at Doom9's forum</a>. Apparently it will still work with non-HDCD encoded files, but the volume will be cut in half. So maybe this isn't the best method. Or, supposedly there's a way to check if the file is HDCD encoded using hdcd.exe in test mode. So it's probably a good idea to check if the file is HDCD encoded first.<br /><br />Another method, which I believe is a lot more convenient, is to use <a href="http://www.dbpoweramp.com/" target="_blank">dBpoweramp</a>. Using dBpoweramp's conversion utility, you can activate their HDCD plugin, which automatically detects HDCD encoded files and decodes to 24-bit. If the file is from a non-HDCD audio CD, it is left as 16-bit. Again, it will only work if the file is exactly the same as the original HDCD encoded CD. So it had to have been ripped to uncompressed WAV or losslessly compressed FLAC, lossless WMA, etc., etc. When you convert the file just use the same encoding method (I usually just use FLAC) and overwrite the original file.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUl_dpK1spInUOEg16zLxNIn2NujoiCIVEDyuPPnokG_KuDX6OvCUi_9o_5vdyy59Qw5itOuXB7Dxcd_nhxw92kslRuOm3XLWRjUK2coUXgR41AlIKDu1GbqkWzU_lVmIgKZhoRPQgHIw/s1600-h/dBpoweramp.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 299px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUl_dpK1spInUOEg16zLxNIn2NujoiCIVEDyuPPnokG_KuDX6OvCUi_9o_5vdyy59Qw5itOuXB7Dxcd_nhxw92kslRuOm3XLWRjUK2coUXgR41AlIKDu1GbqkWzU_lVmIgKZhoRPQgHIw/s320/dBpoweramp.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5432297193011243362" border="0" /></a>You can now play your decoded 24-bit 44.1kHz audio file on your PC with any software player. Now, all you have to do is dig through you CD collection and check the back of the disc for the HDCD logo and go to work. If these CDs have already been ripped, then use the dBpoweramp converter to decode them to the higher resolution. Some HDCD encoded discs do not have the logo printed on their back cover, but still include this capability. You could always use dBpoweramp to test if they have HDCD, but that might take a lot of time. You can also search the web for a list of HDCD encoded CDs. I was able to find <a href="http://www.head-fi.org/forums/f9/hdcd-list-65414/" target="_blank">this list on Head-Fi's forum</a>. So before you dig through all your CDs, you might want to check to see what's on the list. I plan to convert all my HDCD encoded CDs to 24-bit when I get the chance.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script></div>Gregg Plummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04797151841680024732noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1200537834385264967.post-5339849717468561492010-01-22T15:16:00.004-06:002012-05-31T13:41:56.593-05:00Wheatus - Pop, Songs & Death, Vol. 1: The Lightning EPI hope this is becoming a trend. <a href="http://www.wheatus.com/main_index.html" target="_blank">Wheatus</a>, an alternative rock band founded by singer/songwriter <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&searchlink=WHEATUS&sql=11:hzfwxqykld6e%7ET1" target="_blank">Brendan B. Brown</a>, is letting listeners download their next EP for whatever price they are willing to pay. This is similar to what <a href="http://amplioaudio.blogspot.com/2007/10/radiohead-choose-your-price.html" target="_blank">Radiohead</a> did back in the Fall of 2007.<br />
<br />
The cool thing about this offer is not only are they letting people choose their own price, but they are also offering the new album in a variety of formats including MP3, lossless WMA, Apple lossless, FLAC and DSD. The WMA lossless is CD quality 16-bit/44.1kHz. The FLAC is basically DVD-A quality at 24-bit/88.2kHz and the DSD (or direct stream digital) is SACD quality.<br />
<br />
The interesting thing about the DSF files using DSD encoding, is that they can be burned to a DVD disc and played back on a Sony PS3. Someone please correct me if I am wrong, but I believe the DSF files are the stereo tracks and the DFF files are the multichannel surround tracks used in a SACD. Lately, I discovered that people are able to digitally extract the audio from SACD and convert to PCM. This is probably what they've done to provide the 24bit/88.2kHz FLAC files. There's also a <a href="http://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_input_dsdiff" target="_blank">DFF foobar2000 plugin</a> that will let you play DFF/DSF files in foobar. I haven't tried it so I don't know how well it works, but I assume it is a decoder that converts the DSD steam to PCM. If that's the case, then you are avoiding the DSD-PCM decoding step if you download Wheatus' FLAC version. It will probably sound the same.<br />
<br />
I made a donation and downloaded the EP and a couple bonus tracks in FLAC format. Without going into an in-depth review, I think it sounds pretty good, both technically and artistically. It was the first time I'd heard anything from Wheatus so I had no idea what to expect. The first track kind of reminded me of something like The Eels, but with a little more range. There's even some interesting Zappa-esk elements to their music. Check them out.<br />
<br />
Update (5/31/12): While researching methods for extracting audio tracks from SACDs, I've learned that DSF files are not limited to stereo. Sure, that's what seems to be the consensus when you search for information about the file format, but I can assure you that there are multichannel DSF files. I still don't have any definitive source of information on this, but I think the DSF file is easier to tag than the DFF file. They include exactly the same audio data, but have different information in the header. I believe you can convert between DSF and DFF by editing the header section. Anyhow, I was told the DSF format is easier to tag and the DFF format is more useful for mastering and editing the audio.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script></div>Gregg Plummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04797151841680024732noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1200537834385264967.post-86391839036046835522010-01-20T11:00:00.007-06:002010-01-20T14:19:28.261-06:00DVD-A RegistryNow that I have a reason to purchase DVD-Audio discs, I've been searching for online sources. It looks like the <a href="http://dvd-a.info/" target="_blank">DVD-A Registry</a> is a place where you can see a list of everything that has been released on DVD-A. It also looks like they include a couple other formats like Blu-ray. There are some other formats I'm not familiar with like MVI and HDAD. If anyone has info on these please feel free to contact me or leave a comment.<br /><br />Update: I just got some more info from Feisal, the creator/owner of the DVD-A Registry. Here's his response:<br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:arial;" >"MVI is dead & gone - it's a CD+DVD with hi-rez stereo and possibly a 5.1 DD track. There were only about 15 MVI discs released ever so its really not that important. HDAD and DAD were coined by Classic Records. DAD was a DVD-video format disc with 24/96 stereo audio only, and HDAD was a DVD-V on one side and a DVD-A on the other side (with 24/192 stereo MLP)."<br /></span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script></div>Gregg Plummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04797151841680024732noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1200537834385264967.post-26700009260172981242010-01-17T13:55:00.004-06:002012-10-21T20:33:35.080-05:00Free DVD-A AlbumIn my last post I explained how you can play and rip a DVD-A with your computer. Some of you may not have a DVD-A, so I found one you can use to try this out.<br />
<br />
Check out <a href="http://www.diatonis.com/dark_edges.html" target="_blank">Diatonis - Dark Edges</a>, an ambient style electronica album. The download link is for a DVD-A ISO image of their 24-bit 96 kHz 5.1 surround sound recording. Diatonis also sells DVD ISO images (both DVD-Video and DVD-Audio) through <a href="http://www.tradebit.com/filesharing.php/search/0/diatonis+iso" target="_blank">tradebit</a> for only US$6.00 per album.<br />
<br />
After you download the ISO, you can use foobar2000 with the dvd-audio plugin described in my last post to both play and rip the tracks. The method described below works on both physical discs and ISO images. If you have any questions, just post a comment below.<br />
<br />
Enjoy!!<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script></div>Gregg Plummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04797151841680024732noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1200537834385264967.post-87711472911126837872010-01-14T16:00:00.002-06:002010-01-15T11:47:01.204-06:00Playing and Ripping DVD-Audio With Your PCDVD-Audio, or DVD-A, was one of the audio formats that was suppose to replace CDs. The other was SACD. Both of these formats are a big improvement in audio quality. Not that redbook CD is a bad format. It actually is quite good when done right. DVD-A supports higher resolution and more channels than CD, which as you know only gives you 2 channels for stereo playback. DVD-A can have up to 6 channels for surround sound. The DVD-A spec supports a bit depth of up to 24-bits and a sampling rate of up to 192 KHz for 2 channels and 96 KHz for more than 2 up to 6 channels. As you also probably know, DVD-Video, or DVD-V, also supports up to 6 channels of audio. The big difference between DVD-A and DVD-V for audio is the multichannel audio in a DVD-V is compressed using lossy compression methods like Dolby Digital (AC3) or DTS. The multichannel audio in a DVD-A uses a lossless compression method called Meridian Lossless Packing. DVD-A can also use uncompressed LPCM, but it can only handle a total bit rate of 9.6 Megabits/second. So high bit rate, high sampling rate multichannel files need to be compressed. Anyhow, MLP's lossless compression sounds exactly like the uncompressed LPCM, so there's no disadvantage to it. The MLPs will sound better than the same music compressed with Dolby Digital or DTS, so therefore it is a better choice for audiophile recordings.<br /><br />I think DVD-A and SACD failed to become the next big mass market format for several reasons. The fact that they were competing formats didn't help and probably created some confusion. New hardware requirements probably kept some people from jumping in before knowing what format to buy, especially since they didn't want to make a mistake and buy equipment that may become obsolete (like Beta VCRs or HD-DVD players more recently). Another factor that may have impeded the growth in popularity for DVD-A might be the copy protection that prevented people from copying the music to their computers. At the time the DVD-A spec was completed in 1999, MP3s were becoming very popular and file sharing with Napster was increasing very rapidly. I think the last thing the record labels wanted was another format that was easy to copy. Consumers on the other hand wanted to copy freely. I'm not sure if this was a big deal because the size of a high resolution multichannel file is huge and wasn't very practical for filesharing.<br /><br />The fact that there's not much music (or at least really popular) music on DVD-A doesn't help either. The big record labels weren't really releasing a lot of stuff on DVD-A. However there is some stuff from a few of the labels like Universal Music, EMI, and Warner Bros. Records, along with a few smaller audiophile labels like AIX Records and DTS Entertainment. Some of the DVD-A releases are older standard definition recordings that have been upsampled and remixed into 5.1 surround sound. I would assume a lot of the newer released music is not upsampled. Originally DVD-As were pretty expensive, but now you can find them for nearly the same price as CDs.<br /><br />To many people surround sound is just a weird gimmick. Originally, it seemed the audio engineers didn't really know how to deal with it. Some mixed the audio so the listener was in the center of a room of performers and others tried to create a more traditional experience with the music coming from the front speakers and ambient sounds from the rear. This was suppose to sound more like a live performance. As far as I'm concerned, both of them work fine when mixed by an engineer that knows what he/she is doing. I guess it just depends on what effect the musicians want us to hear. I think surround sound gives a more accurate sound stage than can be achieved with just 2 loudspeakers. So I don't think it's a gimmick. I'm sure there's the possibility of someone mixing a surround recording that may just be annoying, but that was the case with some early stereo recordings. If you are really interested in the advantages of multichannel surround, you should check out <a href="http://www.ambisonic.net/" target="_blank">ambisonics.net</a>.<br /><br />Enough of the background info... I have a couple DVD-A discs. Actually, I bought CDs that also included a DVD with the overall bundle. The DVD-Video disc portion included some in-studio videos and the DVD-Audio portion included the album mastered in high resolution 5.1 surround. Up until recently I haven't been able to play the DVD-A portion. First, I don't own a DVD-A player. Second, I don't own a Creative Labs soundcard, which was the only product that was bundled with a player that could play DVD-A discs. Now I can play the DVD-A discs on my computer without the Creative Labs soundcard using our prototype technology. However, the method I use will probably work with a lot of hardware. So here's how I did it:<br /><br />The software application I used is <a href="http://www.foobar2000.org/" target="_blank">foobar2000</a>. You can download the current version <a href="http://www.foobar2000.org/download" target="_blank">here</a>, which is version 1.0 as of 1/9/2010. Like a lot of open source projects, foobar2000 has been a fractional number release or in beta for a long time. Foobar2000 is an excellent audio player and fairly popular with people that want the best sound quality from their PC. However, it's not the prettiest or most user-friendly application and doesn't have some of the advanced capabilities of a few commercial players like J.River's Media Center. JRMC can't do many things that you can do with foobar2000. That's why I have both. When you install foobar2000, by default it will locate its files in your 'Program Files' folder. I run Win7 64-bit, so foobar2000 is located in my 'Program Files (x86)' folder.<br /><br />Foobar2000 by itself won't play the DVD-A, for this you need the <a href="http://dvdadecoder.sourceforge.net/" target="_blank">DVD-Audio Decoder and Watermark Detector</a> input plugin for foobar2000. Download <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/dvdadecoder/files/" target="_blank">foo_input_dvda-0.3.4.zip</a> (or a newer version if it is available when you read this) and unzip to your system. Inside the zip file (and now the unzipped folder) you should find a file named 'foo_input_dvda.dll'. Copy or move this file to the foobar2000 components folder. This is a folder located inside the '\Program Files\foobar2000\' folder called 'components'.<br /><br />Before you run foobar2000 and try playing a DVD-A, make sure you aren't running the CSS protection from DVD-Videos, like AnyDVD or AnyDVD HD. These programs ignore DVD-Audio CPPM protection, but somehow confuse the drive into behaving like protection is missing. I'm not sure exactly why this is, but just understand that you'll need to disable programs like AnyDVD before this will work. Also realize that if you like to copy DVD disc images to your computer or server using AnyDVD, it won't work with DVD-A discs. They'll copy okay, but AnyDVD doesn't remove the CPPM protection and the resulting ISO disc image won't play. You need a program like <a href="http://www.dvdfab.com/" target="_blank">DVDFab</a>, which can handle DVD-A. For this example we aren't going to copy the ISO disc image, so DVDFab isn't needed. Just remember that you still need to disable AnyDVD.<br /><br />Go ahead and start foobar2000. I don't remember exactly what happens the first time you run it, but at this time just accept the defaults. For the user interface settings, I think I settled on 'Album List + Properties (tabbed)' for the main layout, with colors set to 'Forum' and the default playlist layout.<br /><br />Next, insert your DVD-A into your DVD drive and wait a few moments for your system to read the disc. Then in foobar2000, use the 'File->Open' command to select your DVD-A file. You'll need to navigate to the disc's 'AUDIO_TS' folder. It should look something like this:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEl-Syloa405cQaj0JCN89wWQAUq9k5iLc42oLTa6Apk4sCfSJAnf_pCiFX65rAX7R9CWZpdkC1tsu7U03bAT07E0E4Y66a25huulKtxJq0DTjK5IjLZdYz0PGrdNw8prhJzpozUfAKuk/s1600-h/select+file.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 194px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEl-Syloa405cQaj0JCN89wWQAUq9k5iLc42oLTa6Apk4sCfSJAnf_pCiFX65rAX7R9CWZpdkC1tsu7U03bAT07E0E4Y66a25huulKtxJq0DTjK5IjLZdYz0PGrdNw8prhJzpozUfAKuk/s320/select+file.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5426424750549825842" border="0" /></a><br />As you can see there's a bunch of files with the extension AOB and one with IFO. It's hard to tell what tracks are included in each AOB, so I just chose the IFO file and it brings up everything.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEia7L1H-TUnjPMbFYCSQf-vG2Oj42sjy9vVVmFjYItQBJkbeuqMmMvoe81ZS8bzzRadus2_of1j0gc3vPDZ-tb7kC51jxyWFP5aHXNshLoYkxqTd9u93KJzctXFN0I0BwIX275Qbm-O_p4/s1600-h/loaded+ifo.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 248px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEia7L1H-TUnjPMbFYCSQf-vG2Oj42sjy9vVVmFjYItQBJkbeuqMmMvoe81ZS8bzzRadus2_of1j0gc3vPDZ-tb7kC51jxyWFP5aHXNshLoYkxqTd9u93KJzctXFN0I0BwIX275Qbm-O_p4/s320/loaded+ifo.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5426425618955241394" border="0" /></a>In the example above, each track on the DVD-A is listed. Some are six channel and some are 2 channel. The track title shows the number of channels, the bit depth and sample rate. In this case 'Lf-Rf-Ls-Rs 24/96000 + C-LFE 24/96000' means it includes the left-front channel, the right-front channel, the left-surround channel, the right-surround channel at 24-bit and 96 KHZ plus the center and LFE (low frequency effects or subwoofer) channel.<br /><br />When foobar2000 opens a file, it will immediately start playing the first track. Which it did in my case. Now you are playing the DVD's MLP files with your computer without any downsampling or conversions. As you can see, it doesn't use a database lookup service like freedb to provide the metadata tags for artist name, album, track name, etc. So you will have to enter this information manually. You can go ahead and edit all the metadata or track info to display the correct tags and the program will save the data and display it the next time you open and play your DVD-A. A good source for album info is <a href="http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=30:" target="_blank">allmusic.com</a>. They include lots of info you can't find in the CD or DVD's jewel case. After you've edited the track info, it's automatically saved in a dvda_metabase subfolder in *.xml files. This folder is located in 'C:\Users\your-user-name\Application Data\foobar2000' (for Vista\Windows 7) or 'C:\Documents and Settings\your-user-name\Application Data\foobar2000' (for Windows XP) and the author of the plugin would like you to share it. This way other people with the same DVD-A won't have to manually input track info. All you have to do is send the new version of your .xml file (you can probably identify it by the time stamp) and send it to maxim.anisiutkin@gmail.com. In case somebody has already entered the data for your DVD-A and you'd like to take advantage of this shared info, you can download the latest dvda_metabase_XXXX.XX.XX.zip file from <a href="http://dvdadecoder.sourceforge.net/" target="_blank">http://dvdadecoder.sourceforge.net</a> site. Just unzip the .xml files and move them into your dvda_metabase folder.<br /><br />Now that you can play your high resolution, multichannel tracks from your DVD-A with your PC, you might be interested in some adjustments you can make to take full advantage of your audio system. Many surround sound systems may have a combination of satellite speakers, full-range speakers and subwoofers. My surround system is made up of 4 Era D5 satellites, 1 ERA D5 LCR and an Era Sub10 subwoofer. The D5s have a pretty good frequency range for bookshelf sized speakers, but they still need a little help below 60 Hz. My big 3-way towers reproduce the bass much better. With bass management software you can redirect audio below a specified frequency to the subwoofer channel. This will substitute the bass missing from the satellites and redirect the bass to the sub. Since low frequencies are non-directional, it should sound just as good as if you had full range speakers. This also depends on the quality of your sub. In my case, the Era Sub10 subwoofer is very good. Some audio drivers may include some bass management features. Microsoft introduced this capability with Vista, but your device has to support their in-box class drivers which take advantage of the SysFX DSP features. If you don't use in-box class drivers and your audio drivers don't include any bass management capabilities, you may want to download the <a href="http://skipyrich.com/wiki/Foobar2000:Channel_Mixer" target="_blank">Channel Mixer plugin for foobar2000</a>. The author of the Channel Mixer plugin also created the <a href="http://pelit.koillismaa.fi/plugins/show.php?id=219" target="_blank">Matrix Mixer</a>, which might eventually provide more flexibility.<br /><br />Since I have a big media server, which I use to store all my ripped music and videos, I prefer to do the same with the tracks from my DVD-As. I don't think it is possible to save the tracks as individual MLP files. So I'd like to rip the MLP tracks into individual multichannel FLAC (free lossless audio codec) files. Since FLAC is also lossless, these will be virtually identical to the MLP and almost every player supports FLAC. Converting to FLAC is very easy with the DVD-Audio Decoder plugin and a standard converter component that ships with foobar2000. The converter component is used to convert (or transcode) from one audio format to another. Even though foobar2000 natively supports FLAC, you will need the <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/flac/files/flac-win/" target="_blank">FLAC command line tool</a> for this to work with the foobar2000 converter. I just downloaded the latest 'exe' that was available and ran the installation routine. All you really need are the core tools, but it won't hurt to include the FLAC Frontend and FLAC Tester. I did not include the source code for my installation. By default, it will create a subfolder in your 'Program Files' folder and install all the files you need. Now you should be ready to rip the DVD-A MLP tracks into FLAC files. Here's what you do:<br /><br />In foobar2000, select all the tracks you want to convert to FLAC. In my case, I'm only converting the multichannel tracks. As you can see, I already edited the track info for my album.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhR6j3gQIAx8MBsLrf-GjDAtrseH8C5mAhVPEJK36RFjjgAbP31VP58sRBtrhc879VzZTqV7cecFpGy7OwRQ_VK4aC-GNP3tpH7PngZDeJwm1rpQnDQskppVjtXHhogFvJ8wGPbTr3a47s/s1600-h/selected+tracks.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 186px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhR6j3gQIAx8MBsLrf-GjDAtrseH8C5mAhVPEJK36RFjjgAbP31VP58sRBtrhc879VzZTqV7cecFpGy7OwRQ_VK4aC-GNP3tpH7PngZDeJwm1rpQnDQskppVjtXHhogFvJ8wGPbTr3a47s/s320/selected+tracks.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5426708713018232754" border="0" /></a>Move your mouse over any of the highlighted tracks and right click. From the menu pick Convert. This will activate the Converter Setup:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4B6qz9gnt7rJaN35p9zGG4DzZhxTw53OBwwKU1Vucso5xpVXt0JSC25PESNBpASwVF9SAHtBGZHtm8TT-7vbxm4sFxY3Lc4BDf-xOIdSEOPHp-jV2JgSQio7pCmgEukfrDaxMHQSvsIg/s1600-h/Converter+Setup.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 273px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4B6qz9gnt7rJaN35p9zGG4DzZhxTw53OBwwKU1Vucso5xpVXt0JSC25PESNBpASwVF9SAHtBGZHtm8TT-7vbxm4sFxY3Lc4BDf-xOIdSEOPHp-jV2JgSQio7pCmgEukfrDaxMHQSvsIg/s320/Converter+Setup.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5426709962809364578" border="0" /></a>In the setup dialog set the output format to FLAC. You can adjust the FLAC level by clicking on the '...' button. The larger the level, the tighter the lossless compression resulting in a smaller file. This also takes longer to generate because of the additional calculations. I just used the default level 5. For now I'm just going to rip these tracks to a folder on my Desktop. I'll move them to my media server later. In the 'Output files' section I selected 'Convert each track to an individual file' and created a naming format of '%track%-%title%'. The preview box on the right shows how each file will be named. I'm going to accept the defaults for everything else and pick 'OK' to start ripping.<br /><br />The first time you do this, the converter will ask for the location of FLAC command line encoder. Navigate to where you just installed the FLAC stuff (in my case it is 'C:\Program Files (x86)\FLAC') and select the flac.exe file and pick 'Open'.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjp3q0vGEa5IOBbnn3N-EJKqFJVAWhCmazcBREGDkKd8euxeijrU5jGdlfdlj6R2LCN0AaduF6qDdJRmp-Boggpwvq7bEs0NmXTcF8sSqvCYbszrIQTfJd0MH-EuAfiGBhmgJ3f5fasV4E/s1600-h/locate+flac.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 222px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjp3q0vGEa5IOBbnn3N-EJKqFJVAWhCmazcBREGDkKd8euxeijrU5jGdlfdlj6R2LCN0AaduF6qDdJRmp-Boggpwvq7bEs0NmXTcF8sSqvCYbszrIQTfJd0MH-EuAfiGBhmgJ3f5fasV4E/s320/locate+flac.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5426714979977820162" border="0" /></a><br />Now it should start converting the MLP tracks into FLAC files.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRTUW1z5qMRMB9dE2GBC52DBZmenHZWgKD5sK4ZrsmFM6eQD1Sz16pdEeik66RMJDBioynULcckdXtEG-BFQ2Y31HdJAyQV4hyphenhyphenmhc6qEgeN-FmObLi-YgwXgCeIPZtmqemQABd5cSuoQU/s1600-h/converting.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 70px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRTUW1z5qMRMB9dE2GBC52DBZmenHZWgKD5sK4ZrsmFM6eQD1Sz16pdEeik66RMJDBioynULcckdXtEG-BFQ2Y31HdJAyQV4hyphenhyphenmhc6qEgeN-FmObLi-YgwXgCeIPZtmqemQABd5cSuoQU/s320/converting.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5426715560412059586" border="0" /></a>That's it!<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script></div>Gregg Plummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04797151841680024732noreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1200537834385264967.post-17128441877735042422010-01-12T20:21:00.003-06:002010-01-12T21:47:43.161-06:00CES 2010 - What Did I Miss?It sounds like I didn't really miss all that much. Reports that've been posted on Engadget and other blogs make it sound like CES 2010 was a lot like the previous years. There're a couple of things I've noticed over the years. The two biggest technologies that get the lion's share of attention are displays and smartphones. Every year they try to have something that's suppose to represent the next great thing. A couple years ago it was large, thin displays. Last year it was large, thin and faster 120 Hz processing speed. Now it's even thinner and even faster 240 Hz processing and now with 3D! So the new big thing is 3D TV. Even if I owned a big 3D capable 60" flat screen TV, I don't think it would be all that great. I think 3D has to be on the really big screens to be appreciated. If I want to see a 3D movie, I'll go to our local Imax. I just cant get excited about sitting in our family room wearing 3D goggles. Just thinking about it gives me a bit of a headache. I'm not even going to comment on smartphones because I'm just not really into them. I also missed a handful of companies showing off tablet PCs that they hope will be competitive with Apple's upcoming iSlate or whatever it's going to be called.<br /><br />There were a few announcements or presentations that piqued my interest. During Steve Ballmer's keynote, he stated several times that the PC was the most advanced entertainment device (or something along those lines). Years ago, even back in the late 80's and into the 90's, they always talked about the convergence of technology. Especially the convergence of TVs and PCs. There were other things, like movies and hi-fi, but I think those were the 2 biggies. Anyhow it didn't happen the way Microsoft, Intel, HP, etc. thought it would. Or it didn't happen as quickly as they wanted. So in the past few CES trade shows, they hardly mentioned the PC. Instead it was all about the extenders and stand-alone gaming consoles, like the Xbox 360 or PS3. The PC was too complicated, noisy, big, etc. And people just didn't seem to understand that you weren't limited to a 17" CRT monitor. The tone seemed different this year. He genuinely seemed excited about all sorts of PCs - laptops, notebooks/netbooks and very small form factor HTPCs running Windows 7, Media Center and potential functionality with Mediaroom 2.0.<br /><br />So since the success of our future products depends on the success of HTPCs, I guess there are reasons to be optimistic. Mediaroom 2.0 will allow major content providers, like AT&T's U-Verse, use HTPCs running Win7 and Media Center to tune into their programming instead of a dedicated set-top box. Initial reports are a little confusing and talk more about using Mediaroom 2.0 with the Xbox 360, but Ballmer made some reference during his keynote about it working with PCs as well. There were also a few announcements about a new <a href="http://www.silicondust.com/press" target="_blank">CableCard tuner from Silicon Dust</a>. I own one of their HDHomeRuns, so I'm a big fan. This is a dual tuner that connects to your home network. Any PC on your home network can tune into programming from cable providers or over-the-air digital broadcasts. The only big problem was you could only get cable stations that were unencrypted or clear-QAM. This limited you to mainly the basic tier, which includes your local programming (including local HD stations) and some crap channels. All the upper tier programming, stations on expanded basic or above, like ESPN, Comedy Central, Bravo, Discovery, etc. are all encrypted and couldn't be viewed and recorded using the HDHomeRun and your HTPCs. This is going to change when Silicon Dust ships their new CableCard dual tuner and we will be able to view and record encrypted programming from the cable companies. The cool thing about these HDHomeRuns is that your HTPC doesn't need an empty PCI-E slot for a tuner. The really small and silent PCs, like <a href="http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/12/dells-inspiron-zino-hd-on-sale-now-in-america-starts-at-229/" target="_blank">Dell's Zino HD</a>, don't even have the space for internal tuners. So the CableCard ready HDHomeRun will be a great match.<br /><br />So, it looks like some of the news out of CES 2010 is encouraging for us HTPC'ers.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script></div>Gregg Plummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04797151841680024732noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1200537834385264967.post-33130478639190249332010-01-08T11:38:00.006-06:002010-01-08T12:33:08.424-06:00Skipping CES 2010This is the second year in a row that I decided not to attend the International CES tradeshow in Las Vegas. I just don't think tradeshows are that useful anymore. It used to be a good way to learn about new advances in our industry and meet with potential partners and suppliers, but that's not the case for us. Also, I've never invested in a booth at CES to demonstrate our technology because we simply cannot afford it, so I don't know how beneficial that would be. As far as getting new information about technological advances in our industry, there is so much noise at CES, that it is hard to learn anything except the big announcements coming from the major manufacturers. Especially those that happen to present a keynote address, which you can't attend unless you happen to be lucky enough to get an invite or are a member of the press. As for networking, it hasn't really been as useful as I'd like. Some of the companies that I'd like to meet with don't have a booth at CES and those that do usually get a private suite in the Hilton and will only meet by appointment. Naturally, their appointments are all booked up with existing partners or potential partners that have the potential to become large accounts. They don't seem to be very interested in meeting with a startup that can't commit to purchasing 1,000 units a month. On the odd chance that we do get to meet with a company of interest, we usually talk with a marketing representative who can't provide us with any useful information.<br /><br />As a gadget junky, it was kind of fun to attend CES and walk through the exhibits and see first hand all the gadgets. I especially enjoyed touring the high performance audio & home theater exhibits at the Venetian Towers. So maybe I'll go back some day. I still register every year just in case I decide to go.<br /><br />Anyhow, with the Internet, I can read most of the big announcements and learn about the new gadgets from my office and/or home. On Wednesday night I even watched <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/ces/" target="_blank">Steve Ballmer's keynote address</a> streaming live to my HTPC. In the next couple posts I'll talk about a few of the big announcements and speculate on their potential impact on our business.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script></div>Gregg Plummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04797151841680024732noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1200537834385264967.post-39580067321111774822010-01-04T19:17:00.005-06:002010-01-04T20:01:23.152-06:00More Amazing Technology - Alter Electromagnetic Ambient ConditionsAt least <a href="http://www.lessloss.com/blackbody-p-200.html" target="_blank">this gadget</a> doesn't cost $10K, but who are they kidding? For only $959, this black piece of metal in a relatively nice frame is suppose to improve the sound of your audio system. How does it work? It seems like magic. You just place it near your gear. You don't even have to plug it in. At least it doesn't waste any power. The Blackbody from LessLoss (I think they also sell high end cables), "greatly enhances your audio playback experience by addressing the interaction of your audio gear's circuitry with ambient electromagnetic phenomena..." and, "The Blackbody takes advantage of the quantum nature of particle interaction, and is therefore able to permeate metal, plastic, wood, and other barriers to affect the circuitry inside your components. This altered electromagnetic influence results in profoundly improved sound quality." These quotes are right off their webpage.<br /><br />Who buys this stuff? After reading the rest of their webpage which explains how it works, I'm certainly not convinced. They try to imply that there's some real science behind this, but that's laughable. They even suggest several Blackbodys can be used to maximize coverage and effectiveness. Yes, of course, the more, the merrier. I only wish they were selling it on Amazon, so I could read some humorous comments and reviews.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script></div>Gregg Plummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04797151841680024732noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1200537834385264967.post-14936080273161568292010-01-04T16:15:00.005-06:002010-01-04T16:50:53.938-06:00What's the Next Big Thing?This blog post isn't exactly related to Amplio's product development or audio, but eventually it might be something we all use.<br /><br />I think the next big thing will be tablet PCs. Because of Steve Jobs and Apple, the tablet PC will get a lot of attention in the coming month. Rumor has it Jobs will make a big announcement around January 27th. There have also been reports that Apple has ordered 10 million tablet PCs from their Chinese manufacturer. Some people have been calling it the iSlate.<br /><br />I think these will be a cross between a Kindle-like eBook and a netbook or laptop with touchscreen capability. Not sure if these will be powerful enough to play HD content, but I wouldn't bet against it considering all the choices out there for inexpensive 1080p capable graphics processors. Add in a USB2 port and these tablets will be useful little music players as well. Wireless USB2 would be pretty cool.<br /><br />Just like MP3 players and the iPod, Apple will probably be credited with the Tablet PC even thought they're not the first. No doubt they'll popularize it because the mass media doesn't follow these sort of things until the Apples or Microsofts of the world make big announcements. HP, Lenovo, Fujitsu, and Samsung have all released products that they refer to as tablet PCs, but these are really more like laptops with swivel touchscreens. I think Apple has probably studied this category for awhile and figured out what works and what sucks, like they did with MP3 players, and they'll come up with something that will be a significant improvement both aesthetically and functionally over those I just mentioned. I doubt Apple's will include a keyboard.<br /><br />The tablet I'd really like to see come to market would be something like the "Courier" from Microsoft's research labs. A few videos demonstrating the Courier's capabilities showed up on the Internet a few months ago. Here the <a href="http://gizmodo.com/5365299/courier-first-details-of-microsofts-secret-tablet" target="_blank">first article</a> that I discovered on Gizmodo. Here's the <a href="http://gizmodo.com/5369493/the-courier-files-how-microsoft-thinks-well-use-their-secret-tablet" target="_blank">second article</a>. I think the Courier's UI is really nice. Hopefully, we'll see it on real products.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script></div>Gregg Plummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04797151841680024732noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1200537834385264967.post-10203387110125619402009-12-09T18:23:00.003-06:002009-12-09T18:30:46.022-06:00Nine Inch Nails - The SlipMore free stuff. At this <a href="http://dl.nin.com/theslip/signup" target="_blank">nin.com link</a> you can sign up and receive a download link for a free copy of the new Nine Inch Nails album "The Slip." The album is available in a variety of formats including 24-bit/96Khz WAV.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script></div>Gregg Plummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04797151841680024732noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1200537834385264967.post-76196213721564486912009-12-08T11:40:00.005-06:002009-12-08T11:48:40.233-06:00And More HiRez DownloadsThis time the samples are from <a href="http://www.highdeftapetransfers.com/storefront.php" target="_blank">HDTT</a> - High Definition Tape Transfers. They offer some 24-bit/192KHz tracks that are encoded using lossless FLAC. Here's what they say on their website:<br /><br />High Definition Tape Transfers specializes in rare classical recordings mastered with the best mastering equipment available. They are available in Redbook CD, 24/96 DVD and <a href="http://www.highdeftapetransfers.com/page/12/hqcd.template" class="style32" target="_blank">HQCD</a>. We also offer our releases in 24/96 and 24/192 (on select titles) Flac downloads for playback on a High End Computer Audio System.<br /><br />They have a list of 5 sample tracks available for download on their storefront. Check it out.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script></div>Gregg Plummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04797151841680024732noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1200537834385264967.post-11538774708129397082009-12-03T17:34:00.004-06:002009-12-03T18:13:45.825-06:00More HiRez Audio DownloadsEvery now and then I get notices for sample tracks of some high resolution audio. I've posted information about both of these sources before, so some of you may have received the same offers.<br /><br />The first is Linn Records. On their website they have an article titled, "<a href="http://www.linnrecords.com/linn-what-is-a-studio-master.aspx" target="_blank">What is a Studio Master</a>?" It explains how analog recordings on vinyl or magnetic tape sounded better than CDs because of the analog to digital process that chopped up the perfect waveform into little bits. They oversimplify things and fail to mention the problems when reproducing sound with a needle vibrating inside the groove of a rotating vinyl platter. Anyhow, I don't want to start a big debate over analog vs. digital or vinyl vs. optical disc. I have a pretty good Linn Sondek LP12 turntable that I haven't used for years. I prefer the quality and convenience of playing digital files from my media server to several computer systems, which are connected to my stereo and home theater gear. They go on to tell us that their Studio Master files are much higher resolution than CDs and sound as good as analogue. I would say they sound better than what you will hear from vinyl or magnetic tape. At the end of the article they provide a link to some sample files. I encourage you to download these and have a listen. Obviously, you'll need equipment capable of handling these files. BTW, the article mentions that Studio Master files are encoded at 24-bit or higher and up to 192 KHz. These samples are actually 24-bit/88KHz.<br /><br />The other source for <a href="http://www.2l.no/hires/index.html" target="_blank">high resolution audio samples</a> is 2L, the Norwegian music label. They have a few tracks in a variety of file formats and resolutions. They also let you choose both stereo and surround versions.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script></div>Gregg Plummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04797151841680024732noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1200537834385264967.post-61231268625252213142009-09-28T16:12:00.007-05:002009-09-28T18:04:36.350-05:00Light PeakWith <a href="http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/25/freecom-announces-worlds-first-usb-3-0-hard-drive-the-xs-3-0/" target="_blank">Freecom's USB 3.0 hard drive</a> ready to ship in November, and many more USB 3.0 products expected in 2010, it looks like USB 3.0 is going to be the most popular connection for peripherals in the future. There are a lot of peripherals that will never need the performance of USB, so they may continue to use USB 2.0, but since USB 3.0 is backwards compatible, it will also work for USB 2.0 devices. So I think more and more motherboard manufacturers may start including USB 3.0 ports.<br /><br />Even though FireWire-800 has been around for awhile, I haven't found any included on any motherboards yet. These manufactures will probably stop including any FireWire ports - IEEE1394a or IEEE1394b) in future motherboards. Actually almost all of the new small form factor, higher performance mini-ITX motherboards don't include a FireWire port. The future doesn't really look to bright for FireWire.<br /><br />Some people say USB became popular because a lot of PC systems and peripheral manufacturers did not want to pay licensing fees to Apple for FireWire. So they conspired to develope USB. Sure it wasn't as fast, but for a ot of peripherals, it was fast enough. Then USB 2.0 came along and provided much better performance. Many argued that it was still not as fast as FireWire for things like external hard drives, but for many people it was fast enough. Now USB 3.0 may make the need for FireWire totally obsolete. Except there is that little issue of cable length, which still gives FireWire an advantage.<br /><br />But maybe USB isn't the perfect solution. I haven't heard of anyone using USB for display devices. Monitors are connected with DVI, HDMI or DisplayPort.<br /><br />Now we've learned that <a href="http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/26/exclusive-apple-dictated-light-peak-creation-to-intel-could-be/" target="_blank">Apple has pushed Intel</a> to develop a new fiber-optic connection for peripherals called <a href="http://techresearch.intel.com/articles/None/1813.htm" target="_blank">Light Peak</a>. Light Peak could be a solution for just about every PC peripheral. It could replace all the cables we currently use for monitors, external drives, printers, scanners, audio interfaces, etc. Distance isn't a problem, at least compared to FireWire, because a Light Peak cable can be up to 100 meters long. So, will USB 3.0 become the most popular way to connect peripherals? Maybe not.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script></div>Gregg Plummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04797151841680024732noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1200537834385264967.post-60058851063870459282009-09-28T15:52:00.003-05:002009-09-28T16:11:28.445-05:00I'm Back...It's been a long time since I've posted anything to our blog. Well, what can I say, not much is going on. Actually, since I rarely receive any comments, I assume very few people read this. So I haven't put any time toward this.<br /><br />Originally, I hoped that if a lot of people read about the development of our products and provided some feedback, we could use their comments to help direct our efforts. It would also show there was some demand for our products. One of the challenges any start-up deals with when talking with potential investors or lenders, is convincing them there is a market for their product. One way to do this is to hire a marketing firm to conduct surveys to try and estimate market demand. These sort of surveys might help show if a new health club at a particular location is viable after asking a series of questions to local residents. The more people you ask, the more accurate your results. If your geographic area is large, it becomes a bit more complex. Typically a well constructed marketing survey costs a lot of money. And we chose to spend our very limited funds on development. So, I was hoping the feedback from the blog would help. Well, maybe it has shown there is very little demand for the type of products we are working on.<br /><br />We haven't totally given up. There are a few interesting technical developments/improvements in the past few months that are promising. So we keep plugging away.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script></div>Gregg Plummerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04797151841680024732noreply@blogger.com0