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Coincidentally, I was just working on a DVD-A project with DVD-A Author when I checked in here and found your post. I'm having basically the same problem (empty output file). I have not used the program since I wrote the guide, but I tested it before (with the same version 9.02 GUI) and it worked just fine. What I'm doing today is slightly different (convert a dts .wav to a 5.1 PCM .wav to be used as input for a DVD-A), but something is going on which I don't understand at the moment... Let's keep each other posted if we find the solution.

Put the Wave extensible format in Plogue to "Never", since you are writing a wav file in a wave extensible format and some programs cannot handle this. They like more the wavs in PCM Microsoft format, which you will get with putting this option in Plogue to "Never". I hope this helps.

shntool is a 2ch tool, so it cannot recognize your 5.1 .wav.

Very good point from Pl4yitLOUD. I did not get my mch from Plogue, but it could be in wave extensible format. I have to figure out how to check that and eventually correct it.

A console utility you can use to see the properties of a mch file is sfprops.exe. The program (freeware) is attached.

This is what I get on my file. Pl4yitLOUD had the right intuition about the wave ex format. On the tests I did when I wrote the guide, the files were recorded from Plogue and were in pure PCM format. That may very well be my issue.

Properties of c:\Audio9 minstrel\6ch\g1\6ch.wav:
File type: soundfile
Format : MS WAVE-FORMAT-EXTENSIBLE
SPEAKER CONFIGURATION: 5.1 (Dolby) Surround
Speaker Mask = 63
Channel 1: Front Left
Channel 2: Front Right
Channel 3: Front Centre
Channel 4: Low Frequency
Channel 5: Back Left
Channel 6: Back Right
Sample Rate : 44100
Channels : 6
Sample Frames : 147088384
sample type: : 16-bit
duration : 3335.3375 secs
no peak data in this infile

To convert the 6ch.wav from wave extensible to standard (6ch_std.wav), you can use copysfx.exe, also attached. The command line I used was: copysfx -h0 -t0 6ch.wav 6ch_std.wav.

Now running the file in DVDA Author...