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Topic: DVD-A Explorer Alpha 8 (Read 97240 times) previous topic - next topic
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DVD-A Explorer Alpha 8

Reply #25 –
Quote from: krabapple on
sometimes the surround mix is also compressed all the hell (e.g. Fragile).  A downmix of that won't improve it.
Well, if the downmixed waveform is less compressed than the original stereo mix it's certainly an improvement.

The channels used for the downmix of Open Car have these ReplayGain values:

LF: -4.15 dB
RF: -4.20 dB
C: -1.40 dB
LS: -4.01 dB
RS - -4.33 dB

But the downmix has a ReplayGain value of -1.37 dB (peak-normalized). So the amount of overall compression is reduced by mixing the channels together and even a heavily compressed 5.1 mix allows for a much better downmixed stereo mix (in terms of compression) than the original stereo mix, assuming that the compression per original channel is equal.

Quote from: krabapple on
Btw, just to be clear,  is that unhappy looking stereo waveform a rip from the DVD-A or the CD?
It's from the DVD-A.

DVD-A Explorer Alpha 8

Reply #26 –
Quote from: Hancoque on
Well, if the downmixed waveform is less compressed than the original stereo mix it's certainly an improvement.


The channels used for the downmix of Open Car have these ReplayGain values:

LF: -4.15 dB
RF: -4.20 dB
C: -1.40 dB
LS: -4.01 dB
RS - -4.33 dB

But the downmix has a ReplayGain value of -1.37 dB (peak-normalized). So the amount of overall compression is reduced by mixing the channels together and even a heavily compressed 5.1 mix allows for a much better downmixed stereo mix (in terms of compression) than the original stereo mix, assuming that the compression per original channel is equal.


But I wouldn't call those individual channel values indicative of heavy compression in the first place (compare them to the stereo mix, which has RP gain reduction  >9 dB).  And I don't see how you could 'recover' dynamic range (resolution) of a heavily clipped MC mix by downmixing  -- whatever compression was applied to individual channels, is still there in the 'sound'.

And too, there's the issue of the original mix vs the downmix.  If you prefer the former mix to the latter, it may not matter that the downmix has more dynamic range.  And in many cases there's a CD version somewhere in the music's history (with the original mix of course) that predates the loudness wars.

DVD-A Explorer Alpha 8

Reply #27 –
Quote from: krabapple on
I'm familiar with ripping stereo tracks; ripping 5.1 tracks is new territory for me. I know how to find and select the tracks using DVD Explorer, but after that I'm fairly clueless. I basically want to archive the surround mix as a FLAC file and stream it from an external hard drive to my AVR, using foobar2k as the player...just as I do with my stereo files. I've never played multichannel music except from discs in a DVD player, sent to AVR via HDMI, ilink, or analog cables. The laptop/HD setup that I use with foobar, however, uses either USB or wireless connection to the AVR.


OK....when I get home....

cool, thanks to you as well as Hancoque! I'd like to learn about the noise thing... I will help you too. I've been wanting to do exactly the same thing with my DVD-Audio discs - ripping to FLAC to then playing in hi-res on my HT system. Now I can do it with ease.

After you extract MLP or WAV with DVDAExplorer (sounds like it's better to leave it at MLP at the moment), you can convert a bunch of them to FLAC really easily, using a GUI (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=135095) for eac3to (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=125966). It's in early early beta stage, but it's the only way at the moment to do this very conveniently. In the GUI choose where the location for eac3to is, and also output path. Drag and drop all your MLP/WAV files into the source box. Then go to the next tab (Eac3to Audio), select Save as Type to flac (near the top), then tick "Apply these settings to all Source Files and Save With Original Name" (near bottom). Then click "Lock Current Settings to Command Line",  then go to Batch Processing Tab, click "Add  Eac3to Command Line to Batch Listing", then "Run Batch Listing". This will happily convert them all to FLAC one after another.

On top of this you can do many other features (sample rate, channel mapping etc.) and convert other codecs too. Anything that eac3to suports. So that's what the GUI author currently has enabled. I'm sure it will become a really nice GUI as time goes on. It's currently up to 1.04 beta. Any questions/feedback, feel free to post over at doom9.

--

Mind you, there's currently no media streaming solution (I know of) that can do 24-bit 96kHz, especially in surround (except some ginormous $3000 thing). So I'm planning to build a HTPC that will have a HDMI sound card...the first ones are coming out mid this year! So no loss in lossless quality will occur at any stage.

--

If you ever want to preview MLP files, there are a few programs that will play it back, although with varying imperfections. First, Creative Mediasource Player (which DOESN'T require a creative sound card, and you can download free at driversdown.com), second, foobar using an avisynth plugin with FFmpeg MLP decoder, and thirdly, DigionAudio2 Professional which is a long-discontinued piece of software with an inbuilt MLP encoder, decoder and playback capability. You can find it on sites it you google it. But in the end we will have a flawless MLP playback capability using FFmpeg in players like VLC, mplayerc, etc.

DVD-A Explorer Alpha 8

Reply #28 –
Quote from: krabapple on
But I wouldn't call those individual channel values indicative of heavy compression in the first place (compare them to the stereo mix, which has RP gain reduction  >9 dB).  And I don't see how you could 'recover' dynamic range (resolution) of a heavily clipped MC mix by downmixing  -- whatever compression was applied to individual channels, is still there in the 'sound'.
No, -4 dB is not highly compressed but you see a difference of about 3 dB compared to the downmix. I just wanted to show the effect the downmix has on the resulting overall compression. Compare the 5.1 mix to a multitrack recording that hasn't been mastered yet. It seems that compressing each track and then mixing the tracks together doesn't have such a drastic effect as mixing the tracks together and applying compression afterwards.

@frenchglen: I don't think it's very desirable to keep the MLP format as the compression ratio is much worse than FLAC.

DVD-A Explorer Alpha 8

Reply #29 –
Here's a 'good looking' DVD-A stereo track (Quadrant 4 from Billy Cobham, 'Spectrum")




and here's a not so good looking one  ("Death on Two Legs' from Queen, 'Night at the Opera', 2002):




here's the same track, from the CD of a 2005 CD/DVD reissue:




and interestingly, here's the front left/right channels of the 5.1 mix of the same track from the 2002 DVDA

DVD-A Explorer Alpha 8

Reply #30 –
and here's the stereo "Burning Down the House' DVDA track from the Talking Heads 'Speaking in Tongues' DualDisc


DVD-A Explorer Alpha 8

Reply #31 –
This is horrible. Just...horrible. Never knew they'd do it on DVD-A. Even for a band like queen!
I suppose nothing's stopping someone from making a crappy, low-res, upscaled, clipped, loudness-riddled album, no matter what format it's on. That's why you must judge each title for its own merits, by ear and not just by the fact that it's a DVD-A. But most are very good, and I'd still prefer it over CD, if it was the same mix.

DVD-A Explorer Alpha 8

Reply #32 –
randal1013, Hancoque, 
On which albums/tracks did these artifacts occur on? The author would like to test those specific MLP tracks.
If I have the albums myself, I could send him the sample, to save you the hassle. If not, he would be obliged to have them sent.

DVD-A Explorer Alpha 8

Reply #33 –
Quote from: frenchglen on
randal1013, Hancoque, 
On which albums/tracks did these artifacts occur on? The author would like to test those specific MLP tracks.
If I have the albums myself, I could send him the sample, to save you the hassle. If not, he would be obliged to have them sent.


nine inch nails - the downward spiral:
closer
ruiner
the becoming
i do not want this
eraser

DVD-A Explorer Alpha 8

Reply #34 –
Quote from: frenchglen on
This is horrible. Just...horrible. Never knew they'd do it on DVD-A. Even for a band like queen!
I suppose nothing's stopping someone from making a crappy, low-res, upscaled, clipped, loudness-riddled album, no matter what format it's on. That's why you must judge each title for its own merits, by ear and not just by the fact that it's a DVD-A. But most are very good, and I'd still prefer it over CD, if it was the same mix.



Well, note that I'm mainly showing stereo DVD-A examples -- most people buy them to listen to the multichannel, I'd expect.  And the Queen DVDA multich tracks look good on a per-channel basis -- no 'apparent' clipping and reasonable amounts of compression....certainly better looking than the stereo waveforms.  I should try makign a downmix of the mch and see what that looks like.  How is that done with DVDA Explorer?

DVD-A Explorer Alpha 8

Reply #35 –
@randal1013: I don't want to listen to the whole (broken) album, but here's one track:
Album: Porcupine Tree - Deadwing
Track: Deadwing (stereo)
Glitches at: 0:51 (right channel), 1:29 (both channels), 1:35 (right channel), 1:41 (right channel), 2:30 (right channel), 3:00 (right channel)

These glitches are by the way easily identifiable using the spectral frequency view in Adobe Audition, because they are like white noise and produce a clearly visible vertical line up to the Nyquist frequency.

@krabapple: Extract the 5.1 tracks as WAV and do the downmix with foobar2000 using the Matrix Mixer component. Use this matrix:

Code: [Select]
  |FL|FR|FC   |LFE|BL   |BR
--+--+--+-----+---+-----+-----
FL|1 |0 |0.707|0  |0.707|0
--+--+--+-----+---+-----+-----
FR|0 |1 |0.707|0  |0    |0.707

Afterwards you can peak-normalize the tracks with any regular audio editor. There may be other ways but this way you have total control and know what's going on. If you use Alpha 8 (which you should at the moment) you can also compensate for the wrong channel mapping by simply using this matrix instead:

Code: [Select]
  |FL|FR|FC   |LFE  |BL   |BR
--+--+--+-----+-----+-----+--
FL|1 |0 |0.707|0    |0.707|0
--+--+--+-----+-----+-----+--
FR|0 |1 |0    |0.707|0.707|0

DVD-A Explorer Alpha 8

Reply #36 –
Quote
I should try makign a downmix of the mch and see what that looks like.  How is that done with DVDA Explorer?

Additionally you can downmix MLP, LPCM, PCM WAV, FLAC, etc. with eac3to (and as always, the gui mentioned). Very useful program for messing around with DVD-A tracks!

DVD-A Explorer Alpha 8

Reply #37 –
Quote from: Hancoque on
Afterwards you can peak-normalize the tracks with any regular audio editor. There may be other ways but this way you have total control and know what's going on. If you use Alpha 8 (which you should at the moment) you can also compensate for the wrong channel mapping by simply using this matrix instead:



I've been using DVDAExplorer Alpha 11 exclusively so far....is there a reason not to?  I haven't heard any glitches as reported.

Another DVD-A stereo waveform to like

Space Truckin', Deep Purple Machine Head DVDA

DVD-A Explorer Alpha 8

Reply #39 –
Quote from: krabapple on
I've been using DVDAExplorer Alpha 11 exclusively so far....is there a reason not to?  I haven't heard any glitches as reported.

The developer has acknowledged the same problems with the samples sent to him by the people who reported it in this thread. Just check if there's any artifacts, but by the looks of your waveforms yours are fine (at least for pops/clicks).

DVD-A Explorer Alpha 8

Reply #41 –
I just tested Alpha 12 and it doesn't produce any of the glitches I noticed before.

DVD-A Explorer Alpha 8

Reply #42 –
alpha 12 seems to be working just fine. 

DVD-A Explorer Alpha 8

Reply #43 –
Quote from: randal1013 on
alpha 12 seems to be working just fine. 

Excellent. 
I like how default boxes ticked are to rip straight to FLAC now! All you need is to manually put flac.exe with DVDAExplorer.exe and, wow, what a fast way to rip your DVD-As, watermarked or not, to your media library!

DVD-A Explorer Alpha 8

Reply #44 –
Can someone explain what effect the various checkable options have in the extract window, and when and why you would use them?


e.g., when would you want to merge groups? when to 'ignore stream encryption'?

DVD-A Explorer Alpha 8

Reply #45 –
Quote from: krabapple on
Can someone explain what effect the various checkable options have in the extract window, and when and why you would use them?

Merge Groups
5.1 audio tracks are divided into two groups. The first group contains channels Lf, Rf, Ls and Rs while the second group contains C and LFE. Checking the option causes both groups to be merged into one file (which is desirable). Since alpha 10 the channel order of the resulting files is corrected from Lf, Rf, Ls, Rs, C, LFE to Lf, Rf, C, LFE, Ls, Rs, which is the common order used by FLAC, DTS and AC3.

Split Groups
This is the opposite of merge groups. One file per channel will be written. So this results in several mono files.

Ignore stream encryption
I can only guess what this is. The program might not try to decrypt the disk if this option is checked. So this might only work when the disk is already decrypted.

DVD-A Explorer Alpha 8

Reply #46 –
I cannot seem to find any artifacts...anyone else test?

I never found any....what exactly are/were they?

DVD-A Explorer Alpha 8

Reply #47 –
Alpha 12 is fantastic.  Thanks very much to all involved.  Is there anyway for us to be able to read the SMART (System Managed Audio Resource Technique) Tables?
Thanks in Advance!

DVD-A Explorer Alpha 8

Reply #48 –
To help those that are unfamiliar with it...here is an excerpt from Sonic's White Paper on DVD Audio:

DVD-Audio will allow both stereo and multichannel mixes of the same music to be
delivered on one disc. So one solution would have been to require that every disc that
includes a multi-channel program must also include a two-channel version of the same
program. But that would have imposed significant limitations on the playing time of
discs with multi-channel programs.
Instead, WG-4 mandated that players support an approach championed by Warner
Bros. Records called “SMART Content” (System Managed Audio Resource Technique).
SMART allows the producer to determine in advance a set of “coefficients” defining the
relative level, panning and phase that will be applied to each channel of a multichannel
mix if it is combined into stereo. A SMART “downmix” will only be played if a discrete 2-
channel mix of a given program has not been included on the disc.
SMART coefficients are specified as 8-bit numbers in a six-by-two matrix, along with a
phase bit for each channel. A set of 16 tables of these coefficients may be defined for
each Audio Object Set (more on these below). The table for each individual track of a
title may be selected from among these 16. This allows producers a workable means
to control the sound of their music in cases where their multichannel mix is downmixed
by the player.

It would allow us to recreate the originally intended 2 channel downmix for the DVD-Audio discs that have room only for 5.1.  Apparently they are stored in a table with the audio.  I don't know if the tables are at the file level or embedded somehow into the MLP stream.  Hope this helps clarify the question.

DVD-A Explorer Alpha 8

Reply #49 –
Quote from: jsktcg on
To help those that are unfamiliar with it...here is an excerpt from Sonic's White Paper on DVD Audio:
...
It would allow us to recreate the originally intended 2 channel downmix for the DVD-Audio discs that have room only for 5.1.  Apparently they are stored in a table with the audio.  I don't know if the tables are at the file level or embedded somehow into the MLP stream.  Hope this helps clarify the question.

But which discs make use of this feature?