How to rip audio only from a dvd.

July 5, 2006 10:52 AM

How to rip audio only from a dvd.

I'm not asking for myself because I don't think I'm smart enough to really understand any of this.

One of my bosses is a bit of an audio snob and he wants to know if there is a way to rip audio (to a pc) only from a dvd while preserving it in the highest quality possible. And further to that quality issue, is .wav the way to go or no?

Also, I'm aware of the legal implications of movie-ripping and that's not a problem.

I'm not sure if it matters but these are concert dvd's.

posted by heartquake to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Cinematize will do what you need. You can extract the audio to wav, aiff or mov formats, and it will work on entire discs or individual chapters.
posted by dickyvibe at 11:00 AM on July 5, 2006

Also, wav or aiff should sound identical at the same resolution, however you'll want an aiff to burn a traditional audio CD, if that's your intention.
posted by dickyvibe at 11:14 AM on July 5, 2006

I've used DVD Audio Extractor and it works seemlessly. You can try it for free for 30 days and it's $32.50 if you decide to register. I use it to convert my favorite movies to MP3 so that I can listen to them on my iPod.
posted by pierow at 11:28 AM on July 5, 2006

You can do this for free with Smartripper and Besweet. Belight is an easy interface that will make the Besweet part go a lot easier -- .vob to .wav in one click. I've used these to rip tons of concert DVDs. Just save the DVD to disk using Smartripper, and then open each of the .vob files in Belight. Select wav output, hit start, and viola. You might also need an audio editor like audacity or soundforge, if you want to cut or combine the audio into tracks. After you have the audio the way you want it, you can burn the resulting .wav files onto a CD using Nero or any other CD burning program.

It sounds complex, but it really isn't that bad... you only need to make one or two clicks in each program!
posted by vorfeed at 11:46 AM on July 5, 2006

Response by poster: Thank you guys so, so much. I appreciate you. You've earned me copious brownie points!
posted by heartquake at 12:31 PM on July 5, 2006

You should be aware that there's a difference between DVD audio (lowercase A) and DVD Audio (uppercase).

Regular DVD audio is 48khz by default, and is lossily compressed. It sounds good, but it's not really any better than multichannel, good quality MP3. If your boss is a big audio snob, you might want to point this out.

DVD Audio, on the other hand, is an audio-only format... it uses its very large number of bits purely to represent sound. It can have a number of different bitrates and channel configurations. A computer can absolutely play these back and do a perfect job of it, with a decent sound card. (48/96/192khz, the three options, are actually a little easier than 44.1 for most Windows PCs.) A Creative X-Fi would be one of the better options for playing back these audio files after they have been ripped.

I think that ripping capital-A audio is harder than lowercase-a, and it will take up a LOT more space. But I don't own any DVD-Audio disks, so I haven't tried it myself.

Note that in all cases, if you want to burn to CDs, they'll have to be resampled, as CDs are at 44.1Khz. This will degrade the sound quality a little, but it should be inaudible to most listeners.
posted by Malor at 4:03 PM on July 5, 2006