This is my first post here.

I have many concerts on DVDs so I decided to rip my favorite songs. I got DVD Audio Ripper 1.0.17. It isn't great, cause it's doesn't accurately find the exact beginning and the ending of a song, so I have to rip the entire concert as one audio file and then split it into songs.

Now I encode some songs into MP3s and then I use MP3 Gain to avoid clipping. The software is supposed to be lossless, although when I play the files in WMP 10 they sounded a bit weird, although I didn't allow MP3 Gain to put tags into the files.

My main problem is how to make Audio CDs from the songs I ripped off DVDs without clipping. What software should I use? If it's not lossless should I stick with clipping??

Glen Sawyer, the developer of MP3 Gain suggested WaveGain or Volumax. So I got them both. The problem is when I set the volume of a wave file to its maximum non-clipping point in Volumax and then calculate the gain in WaveGain it shows around -3 dB. Why so much?

Or should I use normalisation of softwares like AudioGrabber? In that case how high the percentage should be?

Using MP3gain is just fine and using it will not result in a weird sounding file, just a quieter one.

Get a better SW, but I can't suggest it to you



I may be wrong but the problem should be that in fact the audio singnal in DVD format is basically lossy compressed, so MP3's you've made are transcoded.
If I'm wrong please correct me...



When you make a CD-DA from audio signal from DVD, AFAIK there's no need to lower the volume to aviod clipping... Except the clipping introduced by the conversion, but that's a problem of wrong SW...
If I'm wrong please correct me...



I'm not able to respond to your last 2 questions...

Was the audio source lpcm or pcm? From my experience pcm demuxes into ac3(lossy) and lcpm demuxes into wav(lossless).

Which bitrate did you use for the mp3 files?

As I get it Audio Ripper only supports LPCM.

I only got Audio Ripper cause I wanted to rip the two Ricky Nelson songs from Rio Bravo, and since the movie is 45 years old I figuered any decent software will do it.

I want perfection when I rip my concerts. But like I said I'm not much satisfied with the result I got with Audio Ripper, but that can be - like you said - due to the fact that audio singnal in DVD format is lossy compressed.

I used LAME 1.32 (engine 3.97) encoder on 192 kbps, stereo, high quality. Audio was reduced from 48 KHz to 44.1 KHz in high quality by Audio Ripper.

So can anybody suggest better software that isn't expensive?

Thanks for the help y'all!

Some tips.
- Use DVD Decrypter.
- Split by chapter.
- Demux audio stream on ripping.

- Use foobar2000 for mp3 encoding (with lame).

I got DVD Decrupter and DVD Audio Extractor 2.3.1, but the result's still not good. When I burn the files on an Audio CD there's a gap between the songs, although I made sure the pause between tracks is 0 seconds (I use Nero).

Also I used mp3Trim to see if there's silence at the start or the end of tracks and the results were negative. I guess the problem is that DVD Audio Extractor 2.3.1 isn't accurate in finding the start and the ending of a chapter just like Audio Ripper I originally used.

The sound quality however is fine. I need a software that would allow me to grab the entire audio as one file and than I need software that would allow me to split it into tracks without any quality loss, if such software exsists at all.

I use a total recorder,it will allow you to record all show in one file..It will record in a wav,mp3 or ogg.Also it has inbuilt feature for splitting tracks but i doubt is good.You can record in a wave and use foobar to convert to mp3.
It has been said that nero cant do a gapless,so i would advise you to use a foobar`s diskwriter with Lame3.90.3.It will produce a 100% gapless output,and afaik thats the only 100 % proven solution regarding mp3

Edit: Regarding editing-spliting of files,when you record that wave any editor will do a decent job.
Also Latexxx solution is excelent

One of the problems is media players on a computer may produce what is perceived as "gapless," perhaps due to fading one track into the next, however when creating an audio CD version one may notice a gap, or a small tick sound between the transition of two gapless tracks, or a gapless performance such as live concerts. From my experience using things like mp3Trim, and WavTrim just ain't gonna cut it for ultimate precision, you need to use a wave editor and do things the old-fashioned manual way. Also to ease the need of having to manually edit tracks use MPC, or OGG if you want to use a lossy.

OK, Give me a few days to try out all the options I got and I'll report back what worked best for me. I thank you all!

I just used DVD Audio Extractor this past week to rip the audio from the new 311 dvd. It performed flawlessly for the start and finish of tracks. Except i feel like there is extra length in wav format on the end of each track. I then proceeded to use Lame Drop to encode into APS.

They are quieter, but they sound great. Overall i found the program incredibly easy to use and it did the tracks beautiful just like the dvd. I was hoping i could find a great program like EAC for DVD to rip the tracks and then i would be happy. This is the best medium i can think of? Another Problem. I tried to put the wavs into MKW to make SHN files and it didnt work. So that is a problem with the output wavs of the program.

I rip music and soundbytes from DVDs frequently. Here is what I do:

Use ImToo DVD audio extractor (they are up to version 1.0.30.1018) to extract the enite audio section you are interested in to a .wav file. Make sure you extract to 44.1KHz stereo and not AC3 or 5.1 or something funky. Try a small sample and test it right away before moving on.
I'm not to worried about having it "snap" to the beginning of tracks or chapters because I just use a quality wave editor. Getting the audio off the DVD is the "hard" part. Cutting up the tracks is the easy part.

Once I have the wave file ripped, I load it into GoldWave. You can zoom in to hundredths of a second if you want and set markers or cue points. You can then set the start and finish markers to cue points you have created and then save to a seperate file. Even live shows are gapless when you set the start marker of file 2 to the same finish marker of file 1. When you have all of your individual files you can delete the original large file. Making a gapless cd is easy from here. I use Nero but not for audio. I use EAC for writing audio cd's, plus you can insert CD-text. You don't have to worry about clipping with the .wav files you have, only when you compress them.

Once you have the wave files making quality mp3's with EAC and lame or whatever is SOP.

MP3Gain is great. I've never heard clipping without it, but I use it religiously anyway to set the volume level of my mp3s to around the same level (My music tastes dictate that around 93dB is ideal for me). Its never made my MP3's sound "wierd". Must be your compression options or source, try lame 3.96.1 or 3.90.3 --preset standard

Normalization? Audio tracks from Concert DVDs should be stellar quality as is. With the wav files just burn them to a cd and you are done. If you also make mp3s, run MP3Gain and you are done.

I've ripped concerts, funny clips from DVDs, as well as stuff from the TIVO using the line in on the PC after creating a 5 or 10 minute wav file with GoldWave. Using GoldWave you just trim off the beginning and ending and set cue points in the middle - simple.

Besides GoldWave, other quality wave editors are Cool Edit Pro (which is now Adobe Audition) and WaveLab - $$$

Indeed GoldWave turned out to be a very interesting software. It's very good for setting precise cue points (and there's an option 'save selection as' that allows you to encode the selection into mp3 format) and you'll find it useful for many other things that aren't related to this topic.

At the end DVD Audio Ripper turned out to be better that other programs I tried for quality audio extracting. However there is one thing that is confusing me and that is the Volume option in the Input Audio settings. How high should it be? Does it matter at all if I use MP3Gain at the end??

Also there's an option for converting from 48KHz to 44.1KHz which is good for people who have audio cards that can't handle 48KHz well and who don't have much HDD space.

I can suggest you two other programs which are free.
You can try EAC's wave editor, if you don't want to use other programs because it suits just fine for basic trimming of wave signal...
If you want a more advanced editor try Audacity...



I've never dealed with DVD extraction of audio but I'm curious what's the best software to use...
You suggested DVD Audio Ripper, DVD Audio Extractor
Latexxx suggested DVD Decrypter and rsadix ImToo DVD audio extractor, so I wonder if there are other considerable programs and also which is for all of you the best and why? (I should create poll )

BTW: Latexxx, can you explain me these terms:

- Split by chapter
- Demux audio stream on ripping



As you now know I've never played with these DVD related things but,
AFAIK you don't need to adjust the output volume. Why you want to deal with it?
Other thing I've figured out is that you want to burn your audio CD's from MP3's created from DVD...? You should make a waves that you burn to a CD gaplessly (edit by wave editor) and then encode your wavs to MP3 or whatever you want... And this lossily encoded file adjust by MP3Gain, encode with scale factor or apply an replaygain to avoid clipping.



I think that it's a good idea to resample to 44 khz when you have a high quality resampling tool because LAME MP3 encoder is optimized to encode from 44 khz. Also when you want to burn to a CD you need it because otherwise burning program do it on-the-fly...

The last thing for now...
Forget Normalization, it's not a good thing because you'll most probably lost volume balance between songs when you apply it... Also it's not a good measure of the real volume of the track. I'd better check out WaveGain and Speek's Frontend...

Last year I promised that I'll report back once I find a way to extract DVD audio and compress it into mp3 and be satisfied with the results.

For making 5.1 mp3s I used DVD Audio Extractor that can extract audio as 5.1 .wav files with Fraunhofer IIS MP3 Surround encoder. The only setting available is joint-5.1 192 CBR. The size of the output file is similar to the tipical 2-channel 192 CBR mp3.

For making stereo (or joint-stereo) mp3s I used ImTOO DVD Audio Ripper with 48 > 41.000 Hz conversion to extract all audio content as one big .wav file in order to avoid gaps between the tracks and then I encoded the file using LAME VBR preset (--alt-preset standard).

The next step was making a cue-file using mp3Trim PRO 1.80. On ctrl+G command it generates a .cue file that I edited with notepad for more accuracate position of tracks. On ctrl+U the program reades the .cue file and saves each track separately in a generated folder.

the sample of the .cue file:

FILE "C:\Documents and Settings\genius\Desktop\Yves DeRuyter - Born slippy [vocal remix].cue" BINARY
TRACK 01 AUDIO
INDEX 01 00:00:00
TRACK 02 AUDIO
INDEX 01 02:51:78
TRACK 03 AUDIO
INDEX 01 04:17:88

I've also noticed that when I compare the results of the two ways of extracting/encoding DVD audio the volume isn't the same. I wonder if it has anything to do with the preset LAME command line I used?

I can also say that this is the exact method I've used, and I had absolutely no complaints with the results. I even kept the tracks at 24bit/48kHz and compressed with FLAC. They were 24bit LPCM from a Miles Davis DVD.

What you want to do is rip in IFO mode, enable Stream Processing, choose only the audio tracks you want (make sure you set the program to split files by chapter), uncheck the video stream, then choose Demux under Stream Processing, and it will rip to wavs. It works beautifully.

I hope that's a helpful explanation.

Why would you want to make 5.1ch MP3's?

It's an experimental branch of MP3. Nothing supports it. Might as well make 5.1ch Ogg Vorbis files. You'd probably get better quality per bitrate as well.

Thanks for these tips. I just tried this method, but I got AC3 files instead of wavs. Did I miss something? Using DVD Decrypter 3.5.1.0. I have Besweet, so I can get to where I wanna go, but obviously having one less step is preferable. Thanks,