Ripping audio off of a DVD...

[Rocketnino]

Hello Gang-

A quick tech question for you all...

My brother and I have recently been getting concert DVD's of various bands, and as is the case with many, the only format to get those shows on is DVD. Oftentimes, the performances are the best - and I'd love to have an audio CD version of the DVD that I can only watch at home.

So my question: do any of you know how to rip audio off of a DVD? Seeing how it's just for personal use, it dosen't have to be 100% lossless... I'm not that picky in this department.

Freeware would be best, but if some software is really worth it, I'd consider paying for it, it's a service I'd really like to have.

Any leads would be very helpful... Thanks in advance!

-adam

[ColinM]

I use High Criteria's Total Recorder standard edition. It's not free, but reasonable. I record line in or what they call "software" mode. It records whatever sound your sound card is producing. Perfect for streaming audio.

I can help you set it up if you get it.

[katnapz]

Go to www.videohelp.com. They have lots of tutorials.

Depending on how complicated you want to get you can just use DVD Shrink (freeware) to rip the vobs, then TMPGEnc (freeware for this purpose) to demux the vobs into seperate video audio streams. Toss the video stream away as you won't need it and then use any number of audio editing/converting programs change the audio stream into a wav or mp3...BeSweet is one of them.

There's other ways to do it too...check out the link.

Of course it really depends on how true to the original you want as you can use just about any audio recording software, with support from your soundcard, that has a line in (or "what u hear") option to just record what's playing on your computer.

[Rocketnino]

Thanks for the leads, guys...

Kat - I'll give your route a shot. I've tinkered around with lots of software options, and I always come up short, they just never seem to work. It's probably a simple task, but it's something I've jacked with for ages now, seemingly.

Colin - If that route fails, that software looks rockin'.

Any other tips out there, team?

[katnapz]

Originally Posted by Rocketnino

Thanks for the leads, guys...

Kat - I'll give your route a shot. I've tinkered around with lots of software options, and I always come up short, they just never seem to work. It's probably a simple task, but it's something I've jacked with for ages now, seemingly.

Colin - If that route fails, that software looks rockin'.

Any other tips out there, team?

I only have to rip audio from DVD once in a blue moon, but each time BeSweet makes me end up slamming my head against the wall in frustration...probably just me as I have to relearn how I did it 6 months earlier, but once you figure it out it's only a couple minutes for the program to do it's thing. Don't give up on that step though as the rest of the process is easy. Just follow the tutorial on BeSweet on videohelp and you should muddle though if you use that route.

[diggrd]

I also go through the relearn of audio ripping from DVD's, now I even have to find all the progs I had before losing a couple HD's. Here's one that isn't a ripper but is along the lines of TotalRecord and free I use it for streaming audio that I want to hear again
http://www.opcode.co.uk/opd2d/default.asp

This is one reason why using ac3 audio on your DVD is a bad idea - sooner or later it will be traded out on cd. It's much harder to distinguish ac3 converted to wav than it is mp3 converted to wav.

Using a "what you hear" type soundcard means that every other sound on your computer will be recorded along with the audio from the dvd. Always wanted to hear "You've Got MAIL!!!!!!!!!!!" in the middle of Corgan singing Rhinoceros or whatever.

[silentmachine]

I usually use DVD Audio Extractor, works fine for me!
Here's a link to it: http://www.tucows.com/preview/343833.html

[katnapz]

Originally Posted by diggrd

....before losing a couple HD's.

There's got to be an interesting story there when you say you lost more than one you know... Most people only lose one at a time.


I agree about ac3 being bad when authoring, but sometimes it's all you have in some situations....funny how right after I posted my initial reply I realized that I received some discs with ac3 files on them that were ripped from laserdiscs....funny because I had to go through the entire "hit head against wall" BeSweet routine last night as I relearned how to convert them from ac3 to DTS wav so I can burn them as surround sound CD's...pretty much got it figured out (again) so I know what I'll have a computer doing today.

there are tons of applications you can use to capture/convert audio (AC3, PCM/WAV, and MP2 - which is on SOME 'homemade' dvds i've gotten). you can do TotalRecorder (or if you have Adobe Audition, it will work) to record the WAV file in real time as the DVD is played on your PC. but that takes at least *real time* + time to split up the tracks, add fade ins/outs (if you like), maybe normalize the audio if the level is low.

here's how i do it most efficiently. again, this is by no means the *best* or only way to do it, but it works quite nicely for me.

1- use SmartRipper (under settings, make sure it's set to split by "filesize" and have the file size set to something large like 8000); click on the "Enable Stream processing" tab, Un-check the video track (and everything else aside from the audio track you want); make sure that "Demux to extra file" is selected, and click on the "rip" button.

2- if it's AC3 audio (which is on a lot of official DVDs, although PCM stereo tracks are on more and more DVD concert releases, some still only have AC3 audio... e.g. Coldplay Live DVD doesn't have PCM audio, i don't think)... then i use a program called PX3 which decodes the AC3 to WAV format VERY quickly, the program (PX3) has a "Normalize" option you can check mark or not. it's very easy and fast to use.

3- resample the audio stream (48>44.1 kHz). i do this in Audition. but there are plenty of software applications that will do this (WaveLab, Goldwave, etc.). even the newer version of Nero does it automatically (no extra processing or converting time used, just drag & drop the WAV files into a new Audio CD compilation). although i haven't taken the time to listen closely to how well it does vs. Audition, it's a "quick & dirty" way of doing this step.

4- i usually use Feurio to burn audio cds. so, i fire it up, spend 5 minutes using its built-in WAV Editor to tell it where to insert track marks. voila. audio cds burned without any clicks/pops. i know Nero has a WAV Editor of its own, so if you wanted to, you could probably just rip the audio stream from the DVD using SmartRipper (as described above) > use PX3 to convert to WAV (if necessary) > use Nero to "author" (define track marks) and burn the audio cds.

[diggrd]

Smartripper was one of those I lost, thanks for the memory jog. Yea the drives electronics are all thats really fried I'm sure if I can find identical revisions I will swap boards to pull off the data. I wass adding some stuff to an older system to add to my media center and ended up toasting 280GB of drives.

[katnapz]

Originally Posted by diggrd

Smartripper was one of those I lost, thanks for the memory jog. Yea the drives electronics are all thats really fried I'm sure if I can find identical revisions I will swap boards to pull off the data. I wass adding some stuff to an older system to add to my media center and ended up toasting 280GB of drives.

280GB... ...ouch...

Yeah, I have a HD that I fried the electronics on too and I've been trying to get something to match up so I can pull some shows off of. Even found one that all the numbers matched, they were manufactured 1 week apart, swapped the cards and still can't access it so I think (hope!) that the card was bad on that one too....been holding on to it for a year now...think I should give up?

[diggrd]

I had one that my sister wanted data from so I found a match on e-bay and they sent the wrong one, it was one of these salvage places so I complained and they sent another wrong one and another and another then they said here's your money back and by the way you can keep all the drives we sent. I stopped looking after that mess.

[1001001SOS]

I use to go here to do my ripping:

http://www.glump.net/content/audio_dvd_rip/guide.htm

there are a lot of steps but it works. I have also used Xilisoft DVD Audio Ripper (http://www.xilisoft.com/dvd-audio-ripper.html). Works GREAT!!!

[diggrd]

doom9 has a lot of good links and info also, this page has links to all the source codes but is also a useful list of open source software http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/software.htm