Ripping DTS multichannel audio from DVD-A

Assume you bought some expensive surround headphones and a special surround edition of a music album, on DVD-A (like Insurgentes by Steven Wilson, for instance). Listening to the high resolution 5.1 mix is a wonderful experience, way more immersive and pleasant than the standard stereo mix through cheap loudspeakers.

Unfortunately, the only problem is that you can't easily bring the music with you: even if you manage to bring the 5.1 headphones, you can't schlep a ton of DVDs even if you wanted. A week ago I finally found out how to rip the DTS audio data on a DVD-A disc to a digital file containing all 6 surround tracks. I'm now enjoying my collection of Porcupine Tree and No-Man records in full 5.1 greatness.

Update: as Simon pointed out in the comments below, this method actually only extracts the compressed DTS sound of the Video DVD, but not the high quality DVD-Audio data. Check out how to rip the uncompressed multichannel PCM data.

Ripping the DTS track

First of all, you'll need to extract the raw DTS data from your DVD-A disc. This can be done quite easily with DVD Decrypter, a program that seems to be somehow related to ImgBurn. Launch the application and insert the DVD:

Select the chapters to extract.

The first screen of DVD Decrypter will ask you which title and which chapters to rip. Since splitting a DTS/WAV track in separate chunks for each song of the DVD isn't easy, I suggest you rip one single track at a time, compress it and proceed with the next. This takes a long time, but in overall it should be easier and preciser.

Also note that the DVD-A may contain one (or more) chapters before the first song or after the last one. You'll have to check out the structure of the DVD using a normal DVD player first and then select the correct chapters.

Select the right stream and enable demuxing.

On the Stream processing tab, check the "Enable stream processing" checkbox and then ensure that the correct DTS stream is checked in the list below. Select the stream and enable Demux on the option panel on the bottom. This will tell DVD Decrypter to extract the selected stream and store it as a separate file.

Now you should be ready: click on the start button and wait till the extraction process is over. You should end up with a single .DTS file in your output folder.

Convert to a 5.1 multichannel WAV file

In order to compress the track, you first have to convert it to a multichannel WAV file. To do so, you'll need a couple of small programs that I found on this interesting page (here's a mirror copy of the complete package, in case the original article disappears). Download the package and unzip it somewhere handy.

Ok. Launch /Tranzcode/TranzGUI.exe and you'll find a dialog like this:

Select your .DTS file as input and remember to check "6 Mono Wav" as output. After a very short transcoding time, you should get a nice separate .WAV file for each audio channel. You can also listen to each one of them, they often sound kind of funny (especially the center channel).

Now launch /BeSweet/BeLight.exe and select File->Create mux file from the menu. You'll find a nice dialog that allows you to select 6 separate WAV files as surround sources (just make sure you select them for the correct channel and don't mix them up). Select "WAV" as output format and then specify an output .MUX file.

Back on the main BeLight window, click on File->Open and select the .MUX file you just created. Ensure that the "WAV/PCM" tab is selected and that you are generating a 16 bit 5.1 wave (that is, a single multichannel WAV file). Uncheck the "dynamic compression" and then "Start processing". This process will take some time, but in the end you will have a splendid multichannel .WAV file that can already be listened to in Windows Media Player.

Compress

Since the multichannel file probably is extremely large, you'll have to compress it before being able to carry it with you on an USB stick. Surprisingly, the official Windows Media Encoder does not work and cannot be used to encode multichannel audio: because of some imperscrutable error, the process fails every single time on my computer... So, let's ditch the official encoder and use dbPowerAmp!

This small encoder is incredibly versatile and powerful, supports a ton of formats and is free to use (some advanced features require a - pretty cheap - registration fee). Anyway, download the dbPowerAmp Music Converter and use it to convert your huge .WAV file. The output format can be pretty much anything supporting multichannel audio: in my case I used WMA 10 Professional with maximum quality, 96 KHz sampling and 5.1 24 bit channels (just to make sure I get the maximum possible quality). You could as well use AAC, FLAC or MP3 (but I bet almost no MP3 player supports multichannel audio).

Automatizing the process

The process described above works, but can get quite tedious after the first tracks (and I absolutely had to rip my whole collection in this way). So, here's a short tip on how to automatize (almost) everything.

First of all, it doesn't seem possible to auto-extract each single chapter of the DVD using DVD Decrypter. This step must be done manually each time.

The rest of the process can be easily handled using a batch script (all applications mentioned above are GUIs that wrap a command line app). Assuming you have a single .DTS file in a folder (ripped manually using DVD Decrypter) and the applications that you downloaded above are all in your command line PATH:

#Rename the DTS file to a simpler name
rename *.DTS audio.dts

#Transcode to 6 wave files
tranzcode audio.dts

#Mux together to single multichannel wave
BeSweet -core( -input "mux.mux" -output "mux.wav"  -6chwav -logfile "mux.log" )

#Convert with dbPowerAmp
"<path to dBpoweramp>\CoreConverter.exe" -infile=mux.wav -outfile=output.wma \
	-convert_to="Windows Media Audio 10" -codec="Windows Media Audio 10 Professional" \
	-settings="VBR Quality 98, 96 kHz, 5.1 channel 24 bit VBR" -vbr

#Done, clean up
del *.wav
del audio.dts
del mux.log
del *.ifo

For this to work, you'll need to register dbPowerAmp (and thus enable the command-line mode). Additionally, you first must create a .MUX file using BeLight, like this:

audio-FL.wav
audio-FR.wav
audio-C.wav
audio-LFE.wav
audio-SL.wav
audio-SR.wav

So: simply extract a .DTS file and launch the batch file. You should end up with a nicely compressed output.wma file with 5.1 multichannel audio, for your listening pleasure!

And remember, next month the original King Crimson recordings remastered by Steven Wilson should be published. You can't miss those...