Extracting the soundtrack from a DVD Options

[Fractusian]

I have searched the forum for guidance on this question but, whilst there are a couple of topics which come close, can't find anything to answer the query with certainty.

Is there any way of extracting the audio track from a commercial DVD for the purposes of ripping a CD? I have numerous music DVDs which would benefit from this! I have Nero 7 premium but cannot find anything in its particular arsenal to help with this.

If the answer if No, or it's Yes with a ball-aching string of techie steps to go through, I presume it could be done in an analogue sense? ie literally play the DVD on the PC and record the audio to the soundcard? I presume I would have to remove copy protection first using such as DVD-shrink.

Finally, if analogue is essentially the only sensible answer, can anyone recommend some software for doing it with? My PC does not have any such application. The soundard on my Toshiba laptop is a Realtek HD.

Many thanks,
Ian

[Synthetic Soul]

Firstly, please pay attention to the forum in which you post. This did not belong in "Digital A/V News".

Secondly, this search produces a list of various threads on this topic. I'm sure at least one of them must answer your question:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....%2Bdvddecrypter

In essence, you can easily do this by demuxing the audio stream using DVD Decrypter.

Edit: I dug out one of the threads:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=43147

This post has been edited by Synthetic Soul: Jul 23 2006, 09:26

[Fractusian]

Firstly, please pay attention to the forum in which you post. This did not belong in "Digital A/V News".

Secondly, this search produces a list of various threads on this topic. I'm sure at least one of them must answer your question:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....%2Bdvddecrypter

In essence, you can easily do this by demuxing the audio stream using DVD Decrypter.

Thank You.

Actually, as far as I was aware I had posted the topic under "General A/V" and not "Digital A/V News" and I selected carefully before posting.

Also, I stressed that I had searched carefully before posting but the topics I found appeared to be either too complex for my not-so-tech brain to take in or were more to do with ripping DVD-Audio.

Sorry if I have repeated an old chestnut. I will try the link you have pointed me to.

Thanks again,
Ian

[Synthetic Soul]

My search was not meant as a dismissal of your claim; I have used "doom9" and "dvddecrypter" as my search terms, neither of which you would have used if you are inexperienced in the area.

Hopefully you are referring to the Doom9 link I posted in my edit (which is missing freom your quote), as that should be the direct answer you need.

Good luck.

[Fractusian]

My search was not meant as a dismissal of your claim; I have used "doom9" and "dvddecrypter" as my search terms, neither of which you would have used if you are inexperienced in the area.

Hopefully you are referring to the Doom9 link I posted in my edit (which is missing freom your quote), as that should be the direct answer you need.

Good luck.

Understood.

Thank You.

[Fractusian]

I have now successfully demuxed a soundtrack from a music video and now have a nice little AC3 stereo file. Now, all I have to do is work out how to convert it into something I can deal with...

[Synthetic Soul]

foobar with foo_ac3 will easily do this, or another option would be HeadAC3he.

[Fractusian]

I downloaded the Foobar software, popped the foo_AC3 .dll file into the Foobar folder and succesfully managed to convert an AC3 file into a WAV file.

Many thanks for the tip.

Ian.

PS it was only after all that trouble that I realised DVD Decrypter would output to .WMA format, which is resolved and converted by iTunes......A ggod learning excercise though.

[Synthetic Soul]

You're better to go to WAV and then another lossy codec anyway, so you get:

Lossy > Lossless > Lossy

... instead of:

Lossy > Lossy > Lossy

WMA is a curious codec to be able to choose. Maybe DVD Decrypter will let you select any ACM codec, and therefore you could install the LAME version and go direct to that... one to investigate sometime!

[Fractusian]

You're better to go to WAV and then another lossy codec anyway, so you get:

Lossy > Lossless > Lossy

... instead of:

Lossy > Lossy > Lossy

WMA is a curious codec to be able to choose. Maybe DVD Decrypter will let you select any ACM codec, and therefore you could install the LAME version and go direct to that... one to investigate sometime!

Sorry, SS, my mistake. Decrypter does not output to WMA format - only AC3, unless, presumably, you install a plug-in (which I have not). Somehow I ended up with a WMA file in the folder I was outputting to. Not sure where it came from. And yes, I realised that going to WAV was the best from Foobar, and then covert to whatever I want to from there - in my case, AAC. But thanks for the confirmation

All working well now. I've demuxed a few sound tracks; the most time-consuming part is manually splitting the soundtrack up into component tracks using Nero WaveEditor. Since the DVDs are all live concerts, the "auto" function does not work very reliably.

Ian.

[Synthetic Soul]

You may have already seen this, as it was linked from the thread I linked to initially, but you may be interested to see my thread DVD Chapters to Cuesheet Indexes, Any easy way to do this?.

Basically, it describes a method to use the DVD chapter information to create a cuesheet. You could then use the ripped audio file and the cuesheet to create track files. That's what I did.

[stephanV]

You can also use DVDdecrypter to extract each chapter as separate track.