Help w/ DVD-A creation? [solved]

[Esau.]

Hey folks, anyone have any expirence with creating audio DVDs? I was doing some morning reading yesterday over at the Stereophile's forums and came across this cool post:

Yes you read the message subject correctly. It does say "Home Brewed DVD-Audio Discs" and believe it or not, it is actually possible to make your very own DVD-Audio discs at home using the DVD burner in your computer.

Before the sysop police come out and delete this post, I'm not talking about making copies of DVD-Audio discs but rather of making your very own DVD-Audio discs from any 24 bit-44.1/48/96k two channel wav audio files you have on your computer. How you get the wav files is up to you. So far I only know how to make two channel discs, but maybe someone out there can find a way to make a 5.1 channel discs.

Here's what's involved:

1. The audio files - as I said, any 24 bit wav file will work, the sampling rate can be either 44.1k, 48k or 96K. One can make these files using many of the current higher end sound cards available and transfering over a tape or lp to one's hard drive.

2. A copy of DVD-Audio Tools, which can be downloaded from DVD-Audio Tools. Don't worry this is free, open source software and is not infected with any virus or rootkit or other nasties. However, what it is, is a simple program with a command line interface which many of you die hard windows and mac users will be at a loss to understand.

3. What DVD-Audio Tools (along with another small command line program mkisofs) will do is create an .iso image file of the DVD which can then be "burned" using any DVD burning software which can read .iso files. Nero is the program that I used.

Basically what all this means is that instead of taking one's LP's and making copies of them onto CD you can now make high resolution copies of them onto DVD-Audio discs. Now that's what I call progress.

By the way, from what I read, the way I understand it the author of DVD-Audio Tools reverse engineered how to make a DVD-Audio disc by examining what was on a commercial DVD-Audio disc and then figuring out how to recreate that information and put it on a blank DVD. At present there is no commercial consumer level software available for making DVD-Audio discs.

http://forum.stereophile.com/forum/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=4267&page=0&fpart=1&vc=1

So, having a rather large collection 24-bit 48K recordings on my computer (which sadly, I usually convert to 16-bit 44.1k for standard playback off my cpu) I figured I would give this shit a try, so I downloaded a copy of DVD-Audio Tools (here) only problem is, I seem to be completely lost on how the program works, even after reading the "how to" on Soundforge.net (here), I downloaded the latest release & extracted the zipped files, then ran the exe but nothing seems to pop-up to start doing this.

I'm just wondering if anyone else has any expirence with doing this, I made a post at Stereophiles, but strangely enough it was deleted with no explanation. Seems they really aren't interested in giving assistance.

Edited June 22, 2006 by Guest

[bradm]

I'm not sure what you mean by "nothing seems to pop-up to start doing this". If it's a command-line program, you'll need to open up a Command Prompt, change to the correct directory (using the "cd" command; the correct directory is probably the one where the exe files live), and then enter the commands as listed in the how-to. Is that what you're doing, or are you double-clicking on the exe file?

Edit to add: all of the above assumes you're running some flavour of MS Windows.

Aloha,

Brad

Edited June 22, 2006 by Guest

[Esau.]

Yeah, "pop-up" wasn't a very good choice of words. I tried the command prompt first (forgot to mention that), with no results, so I tried the exe file, again with no results (what I meant by "pop-up").

[Esau.]

Edit to add: all of the above assumes you're running some flavour of MS Windows.

Aloha,

Brad

Yep, I have Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005.

[bradm]

Have you tried asking at

http://www.taperssection.com

? They have a Computer Recording Help forum which should cover stuff like this. In it, I found

http://taperssection.com/index.php?topic=52892.0

which referenced

http://199.224.117.240/~scb/index.php?path=dvd-audiofile

as a program which can do the same thing (but may have a GUI). You'll have to be a registered and logged-in member to read the forums/posts.

Aloha,

Brad

[Esau.]

I'll give that a try I guess Brad, thanks.

[Esau.]

Thanks Brad, that did the trick. I found a much simpler & straight forward program for making DVD-A's on that site.

Now I just have to grab a new DVD player since mine has been slowly crapping out over the last few months and not even playing some of my official released DVDs. This is gonna make my burning life & listening enjoyment a helluva lot better (No conversion from FLAC to WAV required either!). First creation was the Zappa Plays Zappa...sounding fantastic!

Cheers

[Hux]

Thanks for the follow-up.

It's a good thing in life to attain closure, and your happiness is basically the cherry on top of this whole situation.

What a fun, sexy time for us.

[Weirdness]

Not sure how much you want to throw down on a DVD audio player but the Toshiba SD4960 is supposedly a great sounding SACD/DVD Audio player on the cheap. I don't think that a standard player will properly process 24 bit/44.1-96k so keep that in mind when you're shopping.