Going through my CD collection again, I've been having a look at the DVD discs that came with a number of albums.
I had just assumed that they were discs with a couple of music videos on them, which I'm not really interested in, but it seems that many of these actually contain high resolution stereo tracks and/or multichannel versions of the album.
For
proper DVD-Audio discs which use
MLP encoding, ripping seems to be relatively easy.
Media Center doesn't seem to have native support for MLP tracks, but there is a
foobar plugin which lets you load
AUDIO_TS.IFO on the disc and extract all the MLP encoded tracks to your PCM format of choice. (FLAC etc.)
From there, you can just import and tag them as normal audio tracks.
But many of these discs are using Dolby/DTS audio instead. (24/96 DTS being common)
So far, the best thing seems to be ripping the "video" (usually just a static image) and audio track to an MKV file using
MakeMKV, which keeps the original Dolby/DTS audio intact rather than converting it.
I can then load that MKV file into
MKVmerge to remove the video track, and give all the chapters the proper track names, which leaves me with a single MKA file.
This is the part where I'm having some difficulty now though - how do I get Media Center to see these MKA files as individual tracks rather than one long track with chapter markers?
MKVmerge does have the option to split the file into individual MKA tracks based on the chapter information, but after finding out that splitting SACD files into individual tracks can introduce problems with gapless playback, I would rather keep it as a single file.
It seems like Particles would be the obvious solution for this, but I'm having difficulty getting them to work well.
Playback just seems to stop or hang at the end of the first track, and I'm having to create them manually. While duration displays correctly when you actually play the individual tracks, each track is listed as having the full length of the album in the normal library views.
Are there any good solutions for this, or should I just accept that they will be listed as a single file in the library?