CD Audio to DVD's -- Will SB tread DVD as a CD

[1kyle]

Hi there

Unfortunately I don't have any CD's to try this on at the moment but hopefully someone in this Forum has some CD's to try this out on at the moment.

1) Use some sort of DVD authoring package to extract WAV audio from up to 12 CD's and create an Audio DVD -- you don't actually have to burn a physical DVD but just make an image.

2) Mount the DVD as a virtual dvd (Nero's Drive Image for example).

3) See if Simple Burner thinks it's a CD and allows you to transfer to Hi-MD disk

There's a nice commercial piece of software DVD--Audio Solo Plus at http://www.cirlinca.com/download.htm which allows you to burn 5 DVD's for FREE so this experiment shouldn't cost you anything other than time.

I'd do it myself but I'm at work away from home ALL this week.

I might be abe to create some CD's first by ripping some Film sound tracks into 44kb/s WAV (CD standard) and have a go later as I've got a few film DVD's for use in the Hotel after work.

I haven't googled for some Open Source software but there might be some on Linux.

Note when authoring the CD sound ===> DVD use the CD standard --DVD Auidio standard is capable of much higher bit rates (you'll get 2 hrs instead of 6 hrs at the top rate) but then this won't play as a "normal CD".

The object of this exercise is to be able to create large ISO's from a number of CD's and then "Poodlefake" the computer into thinking you've mounted an audio CD which Simple Burner can then use to transfer tracks to your MD.

Cheers

-K

[Avrin]

SS and SB are not able to work with DVD discs/images recorded in any mode (except data), including DVD-Audio. This is actually not an SS/SB problem, but a CD-Audio standard limitation (the standard is quite old), since the standard allows raw PCM only, and programs that are designed to rip CDs are not able to work with DVD filesystems (ISO/UDF).

But Cirlinca DVD-Audio Solo is actually a very useful program, since it is able to burn several CDs to a single DVD-Audio disc without any changes in quality, and then rip them back as WAVs when you need them on your computer again. You may also play the resulting disc in any DVD-Audio-capable player.

Another commercial alternative (although with a less intuitive interface) capable of burning and ripping DVD-Audio is Steinberg WaveLab.

There was yet another commercial program for creating DVD-Audio discs, and it even had an MLP plugin for DVD-Audio-compliant lossless compression (allowing you to store up to about 12 hours of CD-quality audio on a single DVD-Audio disc). It was called DigiOnAudio, but its development stopped several years ago, and it only had a Japanese interface. Also, AFAIK, it was unable to rip the music back.

A free alternative (Windows/LINUX) is the DVD-Audio Tools (http://dvd-audio.sourceforge.net). But these tools only work from the command line, and don't have a DVD-Audio ripping capability. And they are not intuitive in any way - you have to set them up manually, with additional libraries, and use a command line with lots of parameters for everything. I have created a set of batch files for running them, but it is still a mess. I also have some doubts about full DVD-Audio standard compliance of these tools, since the resulting DVD-Audio file structure is not properly recognized by GEAR PRO Mastering Edition (although a disc image created by the tools can be successfully burnt by any burning software), and the discs cannot be ripped by DVD-Audio Solo.

But the most simple way to store your CDs on a DVD disc is using FLAC to compress WAV files and a burning program to burn them as data. Don't forget that the DVD-Audio standard only allows you to store up to 9 groups of tracks, and no more than 384 tracks on a single disc, while in the data mode the only limitation is the disc space.

Edited July 15, 2008 by Avrin

[1kyle]

Hi there

Saving as FLAC is a good idea but I do that anyway. Incidentally WINAMP (and some others) are able to play FLAC files directly so you don't need to convert them back to WAV when using a computer. Some programs can also create Playable AUDIO CD's directly from FLAC (with the 600 - 700MB limit of a normal CD).

The real idea here was to find a way of being able to use SB to copy to a Hi-MD 1GB disc around 7 equivalent CD's without having to make 7 ISO's and mount them individually ( as virtual CD's). I'm trying to minimize the number of times I actually need to use SS and certainly don't want to store any more music in its rather flakey DB system which seems to get easily broken.

Upload from MD to a computer for me is not normally a problem since any recordings I've made I'll either do in real time via USB / Optical in on the computer's sound card -- I have a nice deck with optical out or use SS just as a "Pass thru" to create WAV files which I then convert to flac and delete from the SS library -- i.e I never have anything stored permanently in the SS Library.

Cheers

-K

[Avrin]

It seems like there is no way to avoid the 7 ISO's problem with SB. But you may use SS to import 7 albums in WAV format, convert them to ATRAC3[plus], delete the original WAVs to speed up further operations, use CDDB to get track info, and then transfer the music to a Hi-MD disc. When using CDDB, avoid selecting any tracks - SonicStage seems to be much less stupid this way.

PS. My SS library is also always empty, except during transfer periods.

Edited July 15, 2008 by Avrin