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Firstly, a big thank you for Audiomuxer - I think it's brilliant.

I've been thinking for a while about filling a DVD with MP3 files, but not had much luck.

Then I find Audiomuxer which lets me convert MP3 to AC3 and create a VIDEO_TS for burning , but of course one DVD can only have 99 tracks - nice but not full.

So I thought .... what about creating a VIDEO_TS structure for each group of 99 files, renaming each one as it's created
and then using DVDShrink to merge the resultant directories and burn to a DVD.

It works ...

So a DVD can have hundreds of tracks.

Just thought I'd share this.

Whoops .. wrongly posted , I meant this to go in the Audiomuxer area ....

Is DVDshrink creating some sort of menu?

I'm not understanding what "Use DVDShrink to merge (multiple VIDEO_TS) folders" does.

No, there's no title menu as such, but the song titles are displayed as the DVD plays as with a normally produced Audiomux DVD

DVDShrink just allows two or three VIDEO_TS folders to be burned on the one DVD Disk. So, instead of just being able to have 99 tracks
on a disk, you can have as many as will fit.

I tried the resultant disk on various DVD players, and the method works well. I just created a DVD with 258 audio tracks ( and even that wasn't quite full ).

Well I'm not the expert but I think you are slightly miss representing what is going on.

DVD's can have multiple titles, up to 99.

Titles can have multiple "Parts of Titles", typically called "chapters", up to 99.

so you can have 99 * 99 or 9801 songs (as chapters) on a DVD.

DVD Shrink is re authoring DVDs to put multiple titles, from separate DVD images/folders, into ONE DVD image/folder (a single VIDEO_TS folder), yes?

Anway, I think you can already do that. I can't test right now but try this:

Let's assume "songs" on "albums" for terminology. Each "album" will be a "title", and each "song" will be a "chapter".

use the Tool --> Join feature to join all the songs on the album in to one wave file (convert from mp3. to 48 KHz wav first if needed). Be sure to "retag" and save a cue file for each joined album.

Then use the audio conversion feature to convert each album wav file to ac3 (although I think just useing waves (PCM) would work too).

Then load each album file into the main panel of audiomuxer. Once they are all in there click on the files one at a time (you might need to expand, I forget) and click the cue split button, and point to the cue file for that album. That will split each "album" in to songs/chapters.

I think that will work for you. The Audiomuxer author will probably chime in and correct me or expand.

Z

Well actually that seems to put everything in one title.

Zeeround,

Yes that was my thought , and an approach I tried soon after finding Audiomuxer.

However it seems that the splits become chapters under the one title, and therfeore are limited to 99

Perhaps I've misunderstood something.

No, it looks like you're right.

By the way, while doing that testing I looked at other aspects of what you are doing.

You're trying to maximize the amount of material you are putting on a disc and are using AC3 to compress things (vs. uncompressed PCM from wave files). That's fine, and it looks like 192 Kbps is a defacto standard when encoding stereo, so if you are currently using 448 (meant for surround) you can probably fit more by going down to 192.

That said, however, you mentioned mp3 as your source. Anytime you "transcode" from one lossy format to another you will suffer additional quality loss. Ideally you would start with lossless source material like wav, flac, or apple lossless. That way you are only use one lossy process, AC3.

You might want to experiment with lossless source, and the different AC3 (or DTS, which I think sounds better) encoding rates to find what sounds best vs. # of songs on a disc.

Cheers
Z

Zeeround,

I'm using AC3 at 448 because that seems to be the default with audiomuxer. I'm new to this area, and I came across AC3 as being one of the 'native' formats for DVD video ... which sort of lead to Audiomuxer. I see that other bit rates are available , so choosing 192 would indeed fit more tracks onto a DVD.

My more recent tests have been WAV files ripped from CD , but for my initial test I just used a bunch of MP3 files I had hanging around.
I'll give the 192 option a go and see if I can hear any difference.

I don't have a DTS encoder so I can't try that option. Are there any Freeware ones ?

I did find that excellent quality can be obtained by hooking up an iPod to the HIfi and using ALAC files ripped from CDs, but I just thought it would be interesting to see if it was possible to have a DVD which would play on any DVD Player containing a lot of high quality music files.

Kind regards

No, there are no freeware DTS encoders. The least expensive one is the vortex surround encoder (NOT the "Zoom" encoder)

http://www.vortexzoom.com/tag/vortex-surround-encoder/

but I'm not 100% sure that does 48 KHz as I don't seem to have a copy anymore.

Your best bet for high quality is rip your cd to wav, re sample to 48 KHz 16 bit (You'll need to check off "bitrate to" and select 16 bits, in the current version of audiomuxer, to keep the original bit depth of 16) with audiomuxer and use the resulting wav files to make the disc. That will be 48 KHz 16 bit PCM which will work in any DVD player and will be the highest quality guaranteed to work. The down side will be the file size will be ~700 MB per album.

Better quality still if you get a copy of r8brain pro, to do your sample rate conversion (That's vs. the free version of r8brain that audiomuxer uses).

Anyway, starting with lossless rips (44.1 Khz 16 bit) you can experiment with the different lossy encoders (AC3, DTS) and bitrates to decide what you want, in a trade off of quality vs. # of songs per DVD.