A guide to ripping DVD Audio discs using free tools.
Step 1. Determine that you actually have a DVD-A disc.DVD-Audio discs are a special format of disc that contains audio-only tracks, encoded using Meridian Lossless Packing (MLP).
MLP requires a special decoder, which is not supported by Media Center or most other players.
To determine whether the disc you are trying to rip is DVD-A, or a regular DVD video disc, open its AUDIO_TS folder.
If there is no AUDIO_TS folder, or the AUDIO_TS folder is empty, it's not a DVD-A disc.
If it's a DVD-A disc it will look something like this:
If it is a DVD-A disc, continue with this guide.
If it is not a DVD-A disc, you want this guide for ripping Music DVDs to audio tracks:
https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,119957.0.htmlStep 2. Installing and configuring the software.After confirming that it is a DVD-A disc, you need to download the required software.
You will need Foobar2000:
http://www.foobar2000.org/downloadAnd the DVD-A decoder component:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/dvdadecoder/files/foo_input_dvda/With Foobar2000 installed, open it and go to File > Preferences > Components, and install the DVD-A decoder component from there.
With the DVD-A decoder installed, open the preferences window again and navigate to Tools > DVD-Audio.
I recommend that you enable the "do not load stereo downmixes" option. If you only want to rip stereo tracks, you can set that as well.
Step 3. Rip the disc.File > Add Files > AUDIO_TS.IFO will add the DVD-A tracks to the playlist in Foobar2000.
Depending on the disc, there may not be much if any metadata - the disc I used as a test imported like this:
Tracks are named in their encoded format:
- Lf-Rf-Ls-Rs 24/48000 + C-LFE 24/48000 are multichannel 24-bit 48kHz tracks.
- L-R 24/96000 are stereo 24-bit 96kHz tracks.
Select the tracks you want to rip, right-click the selection and use Convert > [..]
Select FLAC as the Output Format, with the output bit depth set to "Auto" and dither set to "lossy sources only".
Foobar2000 should convert your DVD-A tracks to FLAC, ready to be imported to Media Center and tagged.