There is a lot of discussion on this forum and many others about recovering the digital audio from DVD-A discs. Technically I believed from my research that save using software tools which were all but banned, this was a non-trivial (read very very hard here) problem to solve. As an aside, I like this article as a description of how engineers look at varying levels of difficulty: http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2007/07/17/understanding_engineers_feasibility
So, I was recently lamenting my purchase of several DVD-A albums that I couldn't add to my slimserver library. I really didn't want to have to give more money to the record companies by purchasing the same titles on CD. However, having recently purchased an Apple Macbook, I was interested in this machine's digital audio capabilities (SPDIF in/out) and gave some thought to how this could be used to capture the output of my DVD-A player. Enter GarageBand. This app allows you to specify a track-type (non-midi) which sources its signal from the system (digital) input. This gave me the opportunity to capture the optical spdif ouptut of my DVD player while playing the disc in 96 kHz/24 bit stereo mode. Some discs are recorded at up to 192 KHz I believe - the mac only samples as high as 96, so beware... Now it was just a case of exporting the .band (garageband format) file to AIFF (which down-samples the signal to 44.1kHz @24 bits - you will get only 16 bits if you don't have 'best' quality selected on the export dialog). I'm no audiophile but assuming the full 24 bits are decoded by the SB3, then this *should* sound better. I always thought my DVD-A recordings sounded much brighter and more *crisp*, if that's an appropriate description, for vocals, percussion and acoustic guitar (on tracks like 'Second Hand News', the instrument could be right beside you). Then it's just a case of converting this to wav format, and you're done...This step is optional, but because I use flac as the standard for my library, it was appropriate. Again depending on the tool you use, make sure you don't lose the extra 8 bits. Notwithstanding the fact that there is not really a squeaky clean signal path (optical is pretty good, if you don't consider jitter), and it is a lengthy process, it was a better result than having to head back to the CD cabinet each time. Cheers -- peejay Music is what feelings sound like - Unknown ------------------------------------------------------------------------ peejay's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=7046 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=38018 _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/ripping
