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[AndrewFG]

I just bought the Pink Floyd "Endless River" collection, and am now puzzling how to rip it into MC ...

The set consists of a CD plus a Blu-Ray. The CD is a regular 44100Hz 16bit 2ch disk and this imports as easily as you would expect. The Blu-Ray disk contains some historical video clips "extras", and it also has all the same tracks as the CD but recorded in hi-res 96000Hz 24bit 5.1ch.

If I browse the Blu-Ray with the Windows Explorer file system I can see that it has a lot of M2TS tracks on it, and I suppose that these "videos" really comprise the hi-res audio streams combined with a very rudimentary (zero content) video stream (showing just the track title). But if I ask MC to rip the Blu-Ray it seems to rip everything into a single movie rip that presumably has some kind of browsing menu embedded in it.

But I don't want just one single movie rip. Instead I want to rip each individual hi-res audio track from the Blu-Ray into an "album" of individual hi-res audio tracks (in say flac, alac, or whatever). How can I do this? Presumably one should not let MC rip the Blu-Ray as a movie, but rather one should tell MC somehow to rip the individual M2TS files as separate entities? And then have MC split the M2TS tracks into audio tracks (which I would keep), and video parts with zero content (which I would ditch)? Or am I missing something?

Furthermore, according to the blurb, the Blu-Ray tracks contain multiple audio streams such as 2ch / 5.1ch and DTS-HD / PCM formats. So how do I get MC to do this the rip / split process to extract whichever format has the highest resolution?

[mwillems]

I've dealt with similar issues in the past with a two step process:

Use MakeMKV to rip each track as a separate video (choosing the audio tracks you want), that should give you all the tracks separate with the right audio track.

Then use MC's convert format function to extract the audio tracks as FLACs.

[6233638]

Unlike some of the Blu-ray discs I've used, this one seems relatively easy to rip.
I say that because it seems to be a single video track with chapters for each track on the album, instead of an unorganized collection of titles which don't include their track names anywhere.
 
From your comments, I assume you're already running something like AnyDVD HD.
 
If you want an easy solution and don't mind paying, try DVD Audio Extractor: http://www.dvdae.com/



Since I had not got around to ripping the disc myself yet, I thought I'd walk you through my process.
For what it's worth, there is considerably less work to do if you don't mind storing everything as a single track, rather than splitting it.
 
 
1.  Rip the main title with MakeMKV
 
As I said above, this is a relatively easy disc to rip. The album is one long title with chapters for each track, and all audio formats are in a single title.
All tracks are 24/96, so you can just rip LPCM instead of dealing with DTS HD. (not that it really makes a difference)
 


So now you have an MKV file which contains the video track (black screen with the track name) and the stereo/surround audio tracks.
 
 

2.  Split the MKV into individual tracks, using MKV Merge
 
First, add the newly created MKV file, and deselect all files but one of the audio tracks.
In this case, I'm using the stereo track:


 
When you only have an audio track enabled, the file type at the bottom should change to MKA (Matroska Audio) rather than MKV. (Matroska Video)
I'd recommend hitting browse, creating a folder for the tracks, and then saving it as "Track.mka"


Now this is a bit backwards, but we need to create a separate chapter file for the project from our MKV.
Go to the Chapter Editor tab, which will currently be empty, and drag the MKV file into it.
After a few seconds, it should list all 18 chapters.



Now go to the Chapter Editor menu, select Save As, and save it to your output folder as an XML file.
 
 

Finally, switch to the Global tab.
Select the splitting mode as "split before chapters" and enter "all" for the chapter numbers.
For the chapter file, select your newly created XML file.


 
 
Now you can hit "start muxing" and it should be split into 18 MKA tracks:



If you want to do the same for the 5.1 tracks, just deselect the stereo track, select the 5.1 track and mux to another folder, since everything else is already set up.
 
 
 
3.  Import into Media Center, tag, and convert.
 
Import the MKA tracks into Media Center.
Now they will all be listed as "Pink Floyd - Endless River" but as long as they are sorted correctly (check the [Filename (name)] tag) you should just be able to select all 18 tracks from the CD (assuming that you have ripped it) hit "Copy" and then use "Paste Tags" (CTRL+SHIFT+V) on the MKA files to copy the info over to the new tracks.
Now you can right-click the MKA files, select Library Tools → Convert Format and convert them to FLAC, since they're just PCM.

[mojave]

The Particles section of the wiki tells how to do it using Particles. I like to use this method because it is fairly quick.

jmone and MrC and have a guide:  Generate Chapter Based Blu-ray Particles (aka Rip Music BDs Like CDs)

[6233638]

You could certainly use Particles instead of splitting via MKV Merge.
 
If you want to create an audio-only file, simply uncheck the video and mux the audio tracks and chapter file to an MKA without going through any of the other steps.
The MKA file will still include chapters so you can navigate to specific tracks.
This is what I do for discs which use DTS/AC3 audio, as I don't want to split that or convert it to PCM. (a DTS album as MKA with chapters is about 500MB, compared to 2GB if converted to FLAC)


Particles have never worked well for me.

[AndrewFG]

^^

Thanks to you both for some interesting tips. I shall certainly look into this over the next few days and report back on my experiences.

But in the meantime, I guess I am safe in concluding that MC certainly does not make it easy for the user in such a case (??). Perhaps this should be added as a feature request? Something like "Rip Blu-Ray to separate audio tracks"..

[6233638]

It would certainly simplify things.
 
While it may look complicated, it was really only a couple of minutes work to rip & split the album as posted above.

[mwillems]

Clearly I lucked out that the Blu Ray audio I was trying to deal with had separate titles for the tracks.  I had no idea normal Blu Ray audio was structured this way.  Now I know what to do if I ever hit the issue; I found this thread very educational 

But in the meantime, I guess I am safe in concluding that MC certainly does not make it easy for the user in such a case (??). Perhaps this should be added as a feature request? Something like "Rip Blu-Ray to separate audio tracks"..

Reading through the threads it looks like jmone has been pushing a a few feature requests related to this (on the particle side) for a while.  You can add your voice to his.

[6233638]

Clearly I lucked out that the Blu Ray audio I was trying to deal with had separate titles for the tracks.  I had no idea normal Blu Ray audio was structured this way.  Now I know what to do if I ever hit the issue; I found this thread very educational  

I don't have enough Blu-ray audio discs to say what "normal" is for them. Every one I've bought so far has been different.
Most have been easy enough to rip though, either like this one with a single title that needs split, or as individual titles in order of track #.
 
Some have been a nightmare with 50-100 titles due to each format being stored as its own title, a big list of bonus tracks (demos/alternate takes), music videos, other bonus content etc.
That seems to be an exception though.
 
I actually find this way easiest to deal with, since you're only ripping a single file and then splitting it, rather than ripping multiple tracks and hoping they're in the correct order etc.

Reading through the threads it looks like jmone has been pushing a a few feature requests related to this (on the particle side) for a while.  You can add your voice to his.

Being able to build particles from chapters definitely seems like it would simplify things.

[mwillems]

I don't have enough Blu-ray audio discs to say what "normal" is for them. Every one I've bought so far has been different.
Most have been easy enough to rip though, either like this one with a single title that needs split, or as individual titles in order of track #.
 
Some have been a nightmare with 50-100 titles due to each format being stored as its own title, a big list of bonus tracks (demos/alternate takes), music videos, other bonus content etc.
That seems to be an exception though.

The handful I saw had separate titles for each track in the correct order (like episodes of a TV series), so makemkv + convert format was all that was necessary.  I guess I'm not surprised there's no standard on how they're laid out.  Some of those sound like a real pain to deal with. 

Being able to build particles from chapters definitely seems like it would simplify things.

It would, but (like you) I've had poor luck with particles in the past.

[Ekpen]

The Particles section of the wiki tells how to do it using Particles. I like to use this method because it is fairly quick.

jmone and MrC and have a guide:  Generate Chapter Based Blu-ray Particles (aka Rip Music BDs Like CDs)

+1 for easy integration of particles in to MC.

I did not go very far with this particle thing. I thought more work was going to be done on this.

George

[astromo]

I just bought the Pink Floyd "Endless River" collection, and am now puzzling how to rip it into MC ...

The set consists of a CD plus a Blu-Ray. The CD is a regular 44100Hz 16bit 2ch disk and this imports as easily as you would expect. The Blu-Ray disk contains some historical video clips "extras", and it also has all the same tracks as the CD but recorded in hi-res 96000Hz 24bit 5.1ch.

If I browse the Blu-Ray with the Windows Explorer file system I can see that it has a lot of M2TS tracks on it, and I suppose that these "videos" really comprise the hi-res audio streams combined with a very rudimentary (zero content) video stream (showing just the track title). But if I ask MC to rip the Blu-Ray it seems to rip everything into a single movie rip that presumably has some kind of browsing menu embedded in it.

But I don't want just one single movie rip. Instead I want to rip each individual hi-res audio track from the Blu-Ray into an "album" of individual hi-res audio tracks (in say flac, alac, or whatever). How can I do this? Presumably one should not let MC rip the Blu-Ray as a movie, but rather one should tell MC somehow to rip the individual M2TS files as separate entities? And then have MC split the M2TS tracks into audio tracks (which I would keep), and video parts with zero content (which I would ditch)? Or am I missing something?

Furthermore, according to the blurb, the Blu-Ray tracks contain multiple audio streams such as 2ch / 5.1ch and DTS-HD / PCM formats. So how do I get MC to do this the rip / split process to extract whichever format has the highest resolution?

Kudos to the guide from 6233638. That provides an excellent methodology for users who haven't taken the financial plunge into working with AnyDVD or similar software.

However for your situation, I'm guessing that you can access the DVD via MC already. If that's the case, the Wiki already offers the advice that you could employ to make MC work for you in the one place. This funtionality has been available since MC18.0.187.
From here:
http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Convert_Format

... this Wiki entry then refers you to this Interact post:
NEW: Video to Audio Conversion

I'd suggest that 6233638's guide be added to the Wiki entry.

[astromo]

On the subject of Particles / Chapters, I've also found particles to be a bit of messing about.

Probably not as easy as I'd like to think, I posted this at Chapter Suggestion:

Quote from: mattkhan on 05 November 2014, 07:11:49
Provide a simple way to create a bunch of particles from a simple text based descriptor (e.g. a csv of that is just a list of start,end times)

e.g. import chapter files such as those available from http://chapterdb.org/ and integrate them with the video file.

Use a recognised standard that's already existing and that aligns with internet database sources:
https://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolnix/doc/mkvmerge-gui.html#chapterformats

The MKVToolnix chapter standard embedded within MKVs is currently processed by MC, so they at least play together at some level. It would be great to see this brought out further. So, if it hasn't already registered add my voice to simplification of particle management.

[kalston]

I own this blu-ray too and simply used mkvtoolnix (mmg.exe) (and anydvdHD of course), I imported the playlist file of the full album and then set up mkvmerge to split by chapter (I did this two times, one time for the 2.0 PCM track and one time for the 5.1 PCM track and I removed the video part for both while doing this).

No makeMKV and less steps than 6233638.

I don't remember doing anything else at least, of course I can check when I get home. But yes, mkvtoolnix doesn't only work with mkv files.

Once that was done I opened the .mka files in JRiver then converted to FLAC. To tag them I add to use foobar2000 with the musicbrainz plugin (at the time I did it, the integrated tagging utility in JRiver apparently did not know about The Endless River)

edit : 6233638's solution for tagging seems even better, I did not know about copy/pasting tags

[_mulder]

Thank you so much for this guide 6233638. I had tried to convert a Blu-ray of mine using particles before but without success. Your method worked beautifully 

[Ashfall]

DVD Audio Extractor cannot extract DTS-HDMA, it will only extract the core.  In the program it will display that the tracks are 96/24, but the flac files are only 48/24.

There's another program called Audio Muxer which is great for this.  As with others, you need to run AnyDVD first to remove encryption.  Then Audio Muxer can extract individual tracks from the bluray to flac files, including inserting metadata and cover art that you provide.

http://www.surroundbyus.com/sbu/viewtopic.php?p=788