Rip DVD-A on Mac

[bottlerocket]

And then importing the .wav files off my external drive to my Mac in Itunes. Works great. Try David Crosby "if only I could remember my name". It has 2 channel 24/192 on the DVD-A and 2 channel 16/48 on the DVD-V tracks. The best tracks include Jerry Garcia on pedal steel and Phil Lesh on bass. The sound quality is exceptional for such an old recording (1970). Something about an echo chamber in the studio.

 

What other DVD-As are recommended besides Fleetwood Mac Rumors?

 

[sandyk]

bottlerocket

 

I have been listening to rips of the 10 DVD-As that I own.

"Carly Simon-No Secrets" 24/192 is very good, especially the track "You're So Vain"

IMHO, "Alicia Keys-Songs in A Minor" and "Faith Hill-Cry" appear to be very poor quality for what is supposed to be 24/96 origin. (Upsampled ?)"Fleetwood Mac-Say You Will" has been painted by the loudness brush, and has very little subtlety. Going by the photos, the group may have had too much control of the production?

The voices are just loud, and very little individuality is evident,which is in sharp contrast to "Rumours" 24/96 , where the track "Dreams" is very good indeed.

"Diana Krall- The Girl in the Other Room" which is on dual disc, is quite good, and markedly better than the normal CD tracks.

 

SandyK

 

[bottlerocket]

I've often thought it would be great to have a list on this website to document what DVD-As are good and what track formats they include. DVD-As tend to be hit and miss. Some have 5.1 only, and some are not great quality. It seems you never quite know what you are getting without borrowing from someone else's experience.

 

 

 

[ted_b]

http://www.quadraphonicquad.com/QQHiRezPoll2004.htm

 

I've posted here a few times about how to rip with DVDAExplorer, and also moderate a discussion on Audio Circle (HiRez Circle section). My faves, all ripped succesfully with DVDAExplorer (on PC then converted to AIFF for my Mac to Weiss DAC2) in no order, are:

David Crosby (24/192) If I Could only Remember My Name

Beck (24/88.2) Sea Change

Donald Fagen (24/96) Kamakiriad

Jackson Browne (24/192) Running On Empty

Steely Dan (24/192) Everything Must Go

Grateful Dead (24/96) American Beauty

Neil Young (24/176) On The Beach

Pete Townshend (24/192) Who Came First

Cannonball Adderley (24/192) Somethin' Else

Pete Townshend (24/96) Rough Mix

Muddy Waters (24/192) Folk Singer

 

 

 

 

[sandyk]

A limited range of DVD-As at very reasonable prices, including a few Diana Krall DVD-As (one is at the end of the listings, and wrongly spelled) is available at the attached link. I bought my Diana Krall DVD-As from them originally.

Whether they are high enough quality is up to personal taste, but these won't strain the finances too much.

 

SandyK

 

http://www.cduniverse.com/browsecat.asp?style=music&cat=1028

 

[symphonysound]

I am interested in using DVDAExplorer to rip some discs to my computer - but the links for both Mac and PC versions above are broken. Can anybody help with updated links? I have both Macs and PCs. From the thread it sounds as if the Windows version is better implemented but I wouldn't mind trying both as the machine in my rig is a Mac.

 

Thanks for any help you can provide!

 

[sandyk]

symphonysound

The PC version is available at the attached link. My understanding is that the Mac version is problematical.

SandyK

 

http://www.videohelp.com/tools/DVD-Audio_Explorer

 

[symphonysound]

Perfect - thanks so much for the prompt reply! I guess it makes sense to just use the PC version

 

[The Computer Audiophile]

Thanks for digging up that link sandyk. I always lose shortly after I need it for a project.

 

The Mac version has trouble with the disc encryption.

 

[lussary]

There are huge amount of DVD Ripper, Mac DVD Ripper on the market. Before you choose one, you ought to consider the overall quality of the product and choose the best one for you.

 

[indirstr8s]

I was able to use the DVDA Explorer successfully to RIP the only DVDA title (Celebrating the Music of Weather Report-Telarc) I had. I never had a DVDA player to play it though. The disk can rest in peace now :-))

 

 

 

 

[Eric2]

Just digging this old thread out again!

 

I have a Mac so I will need to use Boot Camp to run DVDA Explorer. Do I need to get XP or will it work on Windows 7?

 

Thanks.

 

[jonmarsh]

No problems either way under boot camp, which is the same as running native, from the OS viewpoint.

 

[indirstr8s]

This mac version of the DVDA explorer worked fine for me on the mac

 

[The Computer Audiophile]

I can never get the Mac version to rip an encrypted DVD-A disc to wave files.

 

[Eric2]

Having only ever used a mac, windows is very foreign to me. I would only be buying windows purely to use DVDA explorer. If I go down this route I guess Windows 7 would be the better option as its the latest windows operating system. As the software is a few years old I wasn't sure if it would be compatible with 7.

 

Thanks for the link to the Mac version. This was my original intention but got put off because of the problems Chris and others were having. Do you have success saving the files as something different from wave? Would be great not to have to go down the Windows 7/Vista route.

 

 

[busybeingborn]

I've just found an explanation:

 

First, you need to point to an AUDIO_TS folder. This may be on a disc you've loaded in your DVD drive, a mounted disc image, or just and AUDIO_TS folder on storage. Click any of the IFO files, it doesn't matter which one you select. DVDAExplorer will then show you the tracks on the left, and on the right you will see useful information for each track, including bit-depth, sample-rate, channel assignment, track size and other detailed information useful for the advanced user. You can also see if the tracks are in MLP format or uncompressed PCM, by the yellow icons in the left pane or the information on in the right pane. The DVD-Audio format allows for some advanced features and playback options, and can be much more complex than a CD. While it may be clearly-laid out in the playback menu on the screen, the way the tracks are actually structured on the disc may be more complex. You will have to look for patterns and figure out which are the album tracks to extract. Sometimes at the end of title groups, there will be 1-second "dummy tracks" which contain silence. 30-second "preview" tracks are also common on some discs, such as in Elton John's Yellow Brick Road. These tracks may also be of a lower resolution than the album tracks. However, some discs will be very clearly laid out, just like a CD, with a simple group of multichannel tracks, and then the stereo tracks.

 

[John]

I have the Mac version and it worked flawlessly on the only DVDA I have. The version is 2008.04.16 (Beta 1). Maybe check your version number.

 

- John.

 

[jimmy8765]

I previewed many (about 15) different DVD and Blu-ray ripping products and Pavtube offered the most flexible combination of options for the two tasks I wanted to accomplish. The thing that I would really love to see added to PAVTUBE Ripping and Conversion software would be the ability to encode video files with more than one audio stream. This would make PAVTUBE the absolute very best and it would allow me to eliminate the need for many other programs and provide me with one program that would meet all my needs!

I am a mac user,I am really excited that Pavtube have released the Blu-Ray Ripper for Apple.I download demo version from here: http://www.pavtube.com/blu-ray-ripper-mac/

 

 

 

[busybeingborn]

Hi all (if the discussion is still going on),

DVDAExplorer works fine for me, but there are a few DVDAs whose ALAC files can't be played by iTunes afterwards like all others (99%). I haven't found out why. And the strangest thing about it is that these files *can* be played by the Finder! I click into the triangle within the file icon and off they go. So after all, it's OK, but only if I don't want to use the Finder at the same time.

 

Does anyone have an idea why some files do not work with iTunes?

 

It's definitely not a bit rate problem; I play files with 6000kb/s (192kHz) in iTunes.

 

[Daudio]

I have ripped the bits from the Fleetwood Mac's 'Rumours' DVD-A twice, but I'm not 100% sure what I have.

 

The FLAC files I produced are only in the 40mb to 100mb size range, and a friend told me that was too small to be hi-rez.

 

The first rip was via SPDIF from an OPPO DV-980H. The second was using DVDAEXPLORER on a PC. I tried it on my Mac first, but the Mac version didn't recognize anything in the audio section of the disk, and was therefore useless. And I lost all the metadata transferring the FLAC file from the PC to the Mac over an older network

 

MediaInfo sys the both sets of files are 24-96, so I should be OK, except for the file size issue.

 

Here is a size comparison for the 'Dreams' track:

Redbook AIFF file: 42.9mb

OPPO file: 87.3mb

DVDExp. file 90.2mb

 

So, is my friend wrong, and those are reasonable file sizes for 24bit, 96k FLAC music track files, or is something wrong somewhere ?

 

 

[sandyk]

Hi Dave

How did you convert the DVD-A track2 file from .wav to .flac ?

DVD-Audio Explorer output this track as a 140mB .wav file.

Alex

 

(Windows 7 32 bit)

 

[santar]

The mlp decoder on the Mac version of DVDAExplorer does not work.

 

You can use it with non-mlp encoded disks, otherwise you must use the windows version.

 

I use version 2008.07.21 (Beta 3) on Parallels with xp and have not had any problems.

 

Santar

 

[Daudio]

Sorry, I neglected to mention that I converted the DVDAExplorer .wav output to .flac with the FLAC.exe program. on a PC.

 

I think I had to input metatdata at some point in is process, but I can't remember exactly. Then when I moved the files to my Mac via a Windows 2000 shared folder, the long, descriptive, file names got changed to 8.3 garbage, and I had to look at relative file sizes to determine which file was which track. And, the metadata was MIA on the Mac except for one field.

 

At least now I can enjoy the music, confident that it is ripped to the proper depth and rate.

 

Now I will look for David Crosbys 'If Only I Could Remember His Name' DVDA, That has been one of my reference albums on vinyl for a long time, and I'd love to hear it in 24/96 digital !

 

In the meantime I have lots of ordinary CDs to rip and organize, and then plenty of vinyl tracks to record... Whew, seems like a lot of work to have instant, lazy access to my music.

 

[bottlerocket]

It is good software. I agree with sandyK's question. How did you get the .wav to flac. The file size is consistent with FLAC which would be compressed about 40% of the size of the WAV.