With Christmas looming I had some spare time to tackle a job that I've had on the back burner for some time. As the subject line indicates, that's extracting the audio from some music videos. I went here to get clued up:
MC18 NEW: Video to Audio Conversionand here's a run down of my experience.
I strayed from the path (possibly without needing to) driven by a need to get stuff done while I had the time. I'm hoping that this post will draw comment to show me where I could have used MC to effect instead of using alternate tools for the job. Note that I did check the forum and Wiki so, if I missed a key piece of the puzzle, it's due to my poor talents with the internet search function. Along the way, I observed some ways in which I believe MC can be improved and offer them up here as food for thought.
OK ..
It all starts with Hell Freezes Over. As in the Eagles live concert.
If you need the back story, check here:
Hell Freezes Over Audio QualityIn short, there are listeners out there who consider the CD audio quality to be sub-standard compared with the DVD. I'll leave you to go through the details in your own time. In purely number terms, the DVD gets better Dynamic Range values than the CD by a significant margin. So, there's some basis to the discussion.
Leaving the value or sense of this to one side, it should be clear what my mission was:
- Extract the Audio from the DVD source in lossless (2 channel stereo) format suitable for listening pleasure
To qualify one point further and just so the picture is clear, my system works in straight forward, good ol', plain vanilla, 2 channel stereo. So, there's not much point in extracting a 5.1 audio track when it needs to be manipulated to achieve a 2.0 output. There's even less point when the source has both a 5.1 audio as well as a 2.0 audio track embedded within it.
So, using MC I could do a convert to audio, just like it says on the pack. However (and please clue me in if I missed it), I wasn't able to select which audio stream from the DVD source. So, I extracted a massive .wav file - presumably because it was loaded with all the 5.1 audio streams. Anyway that's what showed up with the feedback from MC and using other tools like MediaInfo. I did have the option to use DSP studio to manipulate the audio stream to stereo during audio conversion but that doesn't make a lot of sense. Mission fail.
Without taking you through the whole saga, I had cause to source some ... ahem ... other video related, paid licence software some time ago and on the off chance, I checked out what it could do. What it offered is the ability to extract video files from the DVD source leaving the audio streams intact and unconverted (and here's the pearler) by
Chapter. I did give working with Particles a go but it's a fair bit of mucking around and when I was able to pull the video to pieces by Chapter, I didn't look back.
By the way, I had the option to compress the audio stream but, obviously, that wouldn't make sense when audio quality is the goal.
Right, so after running the Chapter by Chapter extraction process (that I was able to do in bulk by the way), I still had the problem of preferentially extracting the 2.0 audio stream. Given that it's the 2nd audio stream, I needed a tool to enable me to select that audio. From what I could make out, most non-selective options that I had available (including MC) would default to the 1st audio stream. Please advise whether MC can do this and if so, how?
Anyway, I found a piece of freeware (Pazera Free Audio Extractor 2.0) that enabled me to choose the audio stream, so I selected the PCM 2.0 stream and extracted it to .wav so that I could trim the audio in MC's Media Editor where required. Easy and straight forward.
I found with Media Editor that I couldn't key in the trimmed time selection. I was forced to make a selection by mouse only. Is there any way that I can be precise with time cuts, rather than rely on my shaky mouse skills?
I also noted that some of the .wav's displayed up to 6 audio streams with only 2 streams that contained audio data. Is there any way to remove audio streams that are redundant using Media Editor?
I then converted the edited .wav to .flac using MC to compact the file. To clean up the audio (i.e. get rid of the empty audio channels), I selected "Output Format" in the DSP Studio option that's on offer from the audio format conversion function and selected the number of channels as 2 channel stereo, without up or down mixing - just to make sure that there was no manipulation.
The result - some cool toons extracted from a vid source in lossless stereo.
In summary, the aspects where MC could be improved are:
1. user editable chapter marks of video files
2. extraction of video by chapter
3. extraction of audio from video by chapter
4. the ability to select the extracted audio stream muxed in with the video (in lossless mode)
5. the ability for Media Editor to select &/or delete audio channels
Regarding Point 1, mkv video files can have their chapter marks edited by users simply using this methodology:
MKV ChaptersThis is why I convert my videos to .mkv, I'm aware that .mp4 has the ability to accept chapters but from what I've been able to make out so far, they're not as easy to deal with as .mkv's.
Is there any reason why a format as simple as this couldn't be included within the .xml sidecar?
The aspects where Media Editor could be improved are:
1. The ability to pick the audio selection by entering the required times by keyboard entry, rather than by mouse selection
2. The ability to delete or pare down the audio channels
Merry Christmas all and I hope you're enjoying MC as much as me, and we all keep doing so..
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Topic: Video to Audio Conversion - Some Practical Feedback in an MC19 World (Read 3267 times)