Ripping DVD-Audio with DVD Audio Extractor

In 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.

DVD Audio Extractor 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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Updates and edits

I 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.

If you know why they might be useful, please let me know and I'll consider keeping them.

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.

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.

Anyone reading this blog?

Hey, it's been over a year since I posted anything. Is anyone still reading this?? If so, leave a comment.

New Software Can Transcribe Music from any Source

Here's an interesting article 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.

Extracting Audio from DVD-Video

I 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 DVD Audio Extractor 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 'Diana Krall - Live in Paris' DVD Video.

After inserting the disc into my DVD drive, I opened DVD Audio Extractor. Here's the main interface:

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.


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.

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:
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.
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.
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.
The next step will take you to the final screen where you can start extracting the audio:
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.

Playing HDCD in Full Resolution

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 High Definition Compatible Digital (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.

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.

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.

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 'hdcd.exe'. 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 thread at Doom9's forum. 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.

Another method, which I believe is a lot more convenient, is to use dBpoweramp. 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.

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 this list on Head-Fi's forum. 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.

Wheatus - Pop, Songs & Death, Vol. 1: The Lightning EP

I hope this is becoming a trend. Wheatus, an alternative rock band founded by singer/songwriter Brendan B. Brown, is letting listeners download their next EP for whatever price they are willing to pay. This is similar to what Radiohead did back in the Fall of 2007.

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.

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 DFF foobar2000 plugin 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.

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.

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.

DVD-A Registry

Now that I have a reason to purchase DVD-Audio discs, I've been searching for online sources. It looks like the DVD-A Registry 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.

Update: I just got some more info from Feisal, the creator/owner of the DVD-A Registry. Here's his response:
"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)."

Free DVD-A Album

In 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.

Check out Diatonis - Dark Edges, 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 tradebit for only US$6.00 per album.

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.

Enjoy!!