DVD-Audio decoder for foobar2000 - Page 8

Hi Guys,

This may be a little off topic but I was wondering if anyone has had any issues with the surround channel's sound level being off on ripped DVD-audio to FLAC using DVD Audio Explorer? For example, I just ripped the DVD-A Chicago 5 as multichannel flac and the front & center speakers were weak and/or the surrounds were too prominent - sort of like the volume level was reversed. I played the DVD-Audio disc and the speaker levels were fine.

It seems to me that the speaker levels should be fixed so I am wondering what is causing this. I don't want to have to play with the sound levels on the fly for the surrounds and if the ripping process happened correctly, the speaker volumes should be just like the DVD -Audio file anyway shouldn't it? I also don't want to use any software to accomplish this as it is too time consuming.

Anyone have any ideas or suggestions? Shouldn't the channel volume levels come through the ripping process just like the original DVD-A file on the disc?


Thanks.

Have you tried playing the DVD-Audio disc with foobar and the DVDA plugin? If so, do the audio levels sound correct? If they do sound correct, then try using foobar to convert to FLAC. Then check the audio levels of the FLAC files. If the audio levels are reversed, then something seems screwy.

I don't have the Chicago 5 DVD-A, but I have several others and I haven't come across the problem you describe with foobar. I haven't tried DVD Audio Explorer for ripping my DVD-As yet.

Thanks for the quick reply. I don't use foobar, (I primarily use dbpoweramp) but I appreciate the suggestion. Will it rip copy protected DVD-A to flac?

Over the next few days, I'll try to rip some other discs I have and see what happens. I suspect it has something to do with the way DVD-Audio Explorer "groups" the 2 mlp files into one flac but I thought the f/l f/r & surrounds were in one file and the center and lfe were in another (will check) which would make it even more odd that the surrounds would be so prominent.

BTW, I am ripping onto a USB hard drive for streaming into my home theater/music system - not on a computer.

My primary player is J.River Media Center, but I use foobar to convert DVD-As to FLAC, among other things. I'm not sure what you mean by copy protected DVD-As. Aren't they all copy protected?

My suggestions were to help you troubleshoot the problem. So maybe you could try downloading foobar and the DVD-A plugin and try it out. If it works, then maybe the problem is because DVD-Audio Explorer has a bug.

I went ahead and downloaded foobar and the dvda plugin. I noticed right off that it seems to be more intelligent than DVD Explorer. It showed one file listing for all channels of each song rather than the grouping required for dvd audio explorer. For instance, Steely Dan Gaucho Babylon Sisters displays as "Lf-Rf-Ls-Rs 24/96000 + C-LFE 24/96000" in Foobar but in DVD-A Explorer, it displayed Lf-Rf-Ls-Rs as one file and C-LFE as another and then the software combines the two during the rip process. I suspect DVD A Explorer is geared more towards WAV files and flac seems to be an afterthought so I think I'll be better off with foobar anyway especially since it appears you and others have had success with it.

What I meant about copy protection was from my reading of other posts: It seemed that there was a lot of software out there that would copy MLP files but not a lot that could actually rip MLP to flac due to the copy protection.

I really appreciate your help!

Following up on my post last night, I have foobar and dvda plugin installed and can successfully rip one track at a time to flac; However, when I try to group rip more than 1 track at a time, it craps out. I get a error saying it was garbage that resulted.

I also wonder how to do a group copy when the resulting read of the dvda shows the same filename for each track (L-R 24/192000). I went in and renamed every track and then set the destination command line at %tracknumber%. %title%[ '('%track artist%')'] which means I no longer get the overwrite errors but it still will not do group rip properly.

I know there is a learning curve with this so I am probably missing some key step here.

Suggestions? Ideas?

Thanks.

Thanks.

I'm not sure what could be going wrong. It's working for me. I'll give you my step by step procedures.

1. select the DVD-A, right click and pick Open with... foobar2000 (I'm running foobar2000 v1.1.1; I also have 'foo_input_dvda' listed in my installed components list; the DVD-Audio Watermark Detector is one of my active DSP. NOTE: you can verify this by going to the 'File' menu and picking 'Preferences'.

2. In the current playlist you should see the MLP tracks for your DVD-A listed. In my case, the tracks from Sting - Brand New Day are listed. I get several sets, some appear to be duplicates, but I can see two sets of 6 channel tracks and another set of stereo. The 6 channel tracks all have the same title - Lf-Rf-Ls-Rs 24/48000 + C-LFE 24/48000.

3. To edit the properties of these tracks, first select a complete set (if there are multiple sets, choose the first one). In my case, I selected the first set of 6 channel tracks. With all of them highlight, right click on one of the tracks and pick 'Properties'. Edit the common fields, like 'Artist Name', 'Album Title', 'Date', 'Genre', etc. Next, edit the 'Track Title' for each track. You will need to select these tracks individually. You may need to make sure they also have the correct 'Track Number'.

4. Once you have all the track properties the way you want, you can select your set again and right click on one of the tracks and pick 'Convert'.

5. Your first time will always bring up the 'Converter Setup' dialog box. If this isn't your first time, you can pick a preset or use the 'last used' conversion method. You can force it to display the dialog box by picking '...' at the bottom of the list.

6. My converter settings are as follows:

a. Output format = FLAC, level 6
(important note: I am using the FLAC encoder from the FLAC Website. You can get to this using the link provided in foobar2000's FLAC setting dialog. Pick 'Output format', highlight FLAC and pick the 'Edit' button below. Then pick 'FLAC Website'. Download the latest version of FLAC and install it on your computer. When you run the converter your first time, foobar2000 asks for the location of your command line converter. In this case the flac.exe file. If you want to try changing your command line converter, make sure the new 'flac.exe' is located in the same place. Otherwise, just delete or rename the old 'flac.exe' and it should ask you for the command line converter again.)

b. Destination. In my case, I have it output to a folder named 'MLP rips'. I have the output type set to 'tracks into individual files' and the file name pattern is %album artist%/%album%/%tracknumber%. %title%.

c. Processing = none.
d. Other - when finished: do nothing.

Then I pick 'Convert'. And it works fine for me.

Thanks. I think the problem might be with my computer and/or dvd drive.....I loaded foobar on another computer and it ripped fine. Gonna buy an external usb drive for the other computer and try it.

Hey guys !

First of all, the plugin works great - I was able to copy all my DVD-As to PC as multichannel wav files.

But I have one DVD-A disc that does not work at all - it has, unlike the others, different sample frequencies for the front and the back speakers:
Lf-Rf-C 24/96000 + LFE-Ls-Rs 24/48000 - I haven´t seen that before and foobar/dvd-a plugin cannot handle this ("Decoder produced garbage at 0:00.000").

Anyone having the same problem ?



audio123

I don't think that is the problem (96k and 48K in the same file). It sounds like you might have something else going on.

I'm a new user too and here a few things I have found in the use of foobar to get better results when converting:

Make sure you have renamed each track a unique name - when foobar initially scans the disc it gives each title the same name for some bizarre reason. You have to go back and manually change the name of each track. It will crap out if it tries to rip the same song over and over in the same spot and give you the garbage message.

Also, make sure the directory you are ripping to is valid and that there are no other files in there by the same name.

Also, I used the dvd-a watermark plugin and had much better results ripping........Not sure why it did. The only problem is that is seems much slower ripping but the results are better. For example, Grateful Dead's Workingmans Dead took about 20 minutes to rir the 5.1 mix to flac with the watermark plugin and about half that time without it. However, without the plugin, it didn't rip all the tracks correctly and I had to go back an re-rip several. Not sure what is happening but with the watermark plugin it rips almost 100% so far.

Lastly, the command line for the file name needs to be 100% valid format.

Any of these can cause weird results.

I still get a few random single tracks that do not rip properly when I do a group rip, but usually a re-rip of that single track works.

By the way, I downloaded and tried both DVD A Explorer and DVD - A Extractor and neither works as well as foobar.........DVD- A Extractor was EXTREMELY slow ripping. DVD A Explorer was error prone in the extreme.

It´s Nena ft. Nena Live from Warner Music -> amazon.de/dp/B0000942HU/
"properties" (in foobar) says: codec: MLP, bitrate: 10368 kbps


audio123

One particular annoyance with foobar and the dvd audio plugin: When ripping a group of tracks to flac, it never rips the first track in the group. It always reports back as having a major problem. Checking the file, the ripped file shows up but the file size is always 11 kb and of course, it is corrupt. I have ripped about 5 DVD-A's so far and it has happened on every disc. It even does it when I rip the multichannel and stereo tracks separately as separate group rips. I have to go back and re-rip that first track by itself and it re-rips fine.

This may be a bug of the dvd-a plugin???

Anyone have any idea what that is?

I tried one group wav file rip just now and it produced garbage on the 2nd track rather than the 1st track (when ripping to flac with the dvda plugin).

I had no plugins or other options going - just a simple wav rip. Also, since this was my first wave rip, I don't understand why it created 2 files for each track of the group rip: One small wav file and then another much larger one, for instance:

01. Never Going Back Again.wav 32 KB
Fleetwood Mac - Never Going Back Again.wav 230,519 KB

08. Only The Lonely.wav 10KB
The Motels - Only The Lonely.wav 331.926 KB


Not sure what that is or means.

Thanks.

I use DVDAExplorer to rip to WAV, then Foobar to convert. Works 100% here.

That I haven't tried yet - Will try it and post results.

OK - I just tried this. I used DVDA Explorer to rip as a wav file and it worked except I got that one track again (out of a group rip) that wouldn't convert for some reason just like with foobar. Converting the wav files to flac using foobar was problem free however.

So, I suspect my issue might be with my dvd drive or its cache or something along those lines. I've got an external USB drive coming in tomorrow and will see if I have the same issue.

I do like this (your) method better for a few reasons but primarily because it seems faster and I also don't have to go in and name every track - DVDA will assign each track a unique name which is something foobar would not do. Some people might like to put the right song title as the file name but it isn't important to me since it will be on my hard drive by album anyway and not necessary to name each song on the hard drive.

I got it working............Just ripped Graham Nash's Songs for Survivors and it worked 100% using your method (DVDA X to WAV and then foobar to FLAC). Works really fast too.

It will be nice to get all my dvd-a discs on HDD so I can stream throughout my home!

Anybody figured out how to rip an SACD yet?

Thanks for you help!

I think ripping SACD is coming. I know there were several people working on this on doom9 (or was that just the SACD-R part) and heard they might be getting close to developing a SACD ripping solution.

What about DVD-A watermark removal? I hear it's close to being done...

I read about a convoluted process using pop/click suppressors and center channel modification...that would be bad. More mangling of an already mangled music source.

Hey I posted here a few months ago asking some questions, pretty much all of which I have since found the answers to, so I figured I'd share what I figured out.

I guess I was mistaken in thinking that ASIO/kernel streaming drivers for bypassing the Windows Kernel Mixer were for SPDIF outputs only, and couldn't be used for the analog outputs. I guess I thought I had read that somewhere. The bit of research I've done seems to suggest that you can use these drivers to get bit perfect sound via the digital or analog outputs.

I got the HDMI audio drivers working for my ATI video card, and got the DVD Audio MLP files playing properly through Foobar, which made me super happy. I was still having problems though. If I used kernel streaming through the HDMI cable, Foobar wouldn't work when set to 24 bit output. 16 bit worked fine, but this means the sound is being resampled, which is no good. I don't know why it wouldn't work at 24 bit. If anyone has any hints or suggestions about playing bit perfect sound through HDMI (if it's even possible on XP, I think maybe you have to have WASAPI which only works in Vista/7) , that'd be great, cuz I can't seem to figure it out.

I had problems playing the stuff I found that was converted from Quadrophonic LPs to MLP through the HDMI cable, and this prompted me to try the analog outputs on my sound card. It worked perfectly, and I have since realized that it sounds WAY better out of the analog outputs, and I now use them to play all of my surround sound music (except DTS cds - for that I have to use the SPDIF). I don't know if the DACs on my sound card are that much better than the ones on my receiver or if it's more a matter of mangled sound vs. unmangled sound (the latter I think). I thought I had no reason to use the analog outputs anymore, but I'm really glad the Quads wouldn't work out of the HDMI, cuz otherwise I may have never known how good the analogs sound.

I had a couple weeks there where nothing was working, and then suddenly everything just kind of started falling into place. I also got my sound card's ASIO drivers working, so I'm using them now instead of ASIO4ALL, which is also nice. I've heard that ASIO4ALL isn't real bit perfect. I don't know if that's true, but if I'm using my sound card's drivers, I know I'm getting bit perfect.

I've pretty much got all the surround sound formats playing on my pc now, except for DTS-MA and Dolby TRUE HD. As I understand it, Windows XP can't play those audio formats (if it can, someone PLEASE tell me how). That's ok, though. I'll have something to look forward to when I upgrade to Windows 7.

One question: If I play a DTS file out of the SPDIF, and it works and clicks on the DTS logo on my receiver, I know I'm getting bit perfect. I know testing bit perfect playback through analog isn't quite so easy, but if the DTS test works, I switch over to analog output, and I change no other settings anywhere (no DSP, volume controls) I can safely assume that the analog outputs are putting out bit perfect sound as well, correct? Another thing I just thought of: should the wave volume slider work in windows work if you are going out bit perfect via the analog outputs? I would think not, right? I'm pretty sure I'm getting bit perfect sound out of the analogs, but it would be nice if I could be absolutely positive.

A while ago I remember reading that the copy protection on SACDs was just too complex to be cracked, but recently I've found SACDs converted to MLP. I don't know if we'll ever get a foobar SACD plugin, but until then, this is a pretty good alternative.

Wow quick ... thanks
But it does not work too, same error message


audio123