SurroundByUs.com

Hi all, I'm a new member, but have been tinkering with surround music for a little while now.

Quick background - big music fan, and whilst my kit might not be reference level, it's pretty good and I've spent a good while trying to get the best sound from it (there's a Sony AV receiver in there, Mission speakers and sub, Sony DVD/SACD player and Apple TV running XBMC handles most if not all of my video content). First multichannel music I got was Pink Floyd's 'Dark Side of the Moon', unsurprisingly, on SACD shortly after I bought the DVD/SACD player. Shortly after that I "discovered" DTS CD's, and have collected a good few of those too. Sadly, I can't play back DVD-A (as my DVD/SACD player doesn't support it) so often I'll rip the DVD-V 5.1 tracks and convert to DTS CD, which although isn't as high quality, at least gives me the ability to hear the 5.1 mixes (I could rip the DVD-V portion to mov and play back using XBMC, but I quite like the ability to throw the DTS CD into the DVD player and use it like a regular CD).

Hardware wise, I was a Windows user most of my life up 'til about 5 years ago when I switched to Mac - which I find to be better for most things, except this kind of audio conversion/creation! There's next to no support on Mac for this kind of thing, and I find myself booting into XP (in a VM) to get this stuff done. For the most part I use DVD Audio Extractor to rip to mono wavs, and SurCode CD Pro to mix together with the DTS codec, then Burn on Mac to burn to CD-R. Also use Alcohol 120% for ISO mounting duties if needed, and I used to use Nero to make BIN/CUE and burning the final results, but this doesn't seem happy work while installed on Windows in a VM. Odd.

Anyway, I recently discovered AudioMuxer (which is how I found this site) which was exactly what I needed for a project (taking 6ch FLAC 96/24 files, splitting to mono WAV to package up in SurCode). Shortly before that I had a hi def (1080p) rip of a BluRay that had 4 audio tracks; 2ch and 6ch LPCM, and 6ch DTS and DTS-HD. The video content wasn't any use to me, but I wanted to strip out the DTS track to make a DTS CD from it, but for the life of me I couldn't figure out how to do it, as up 'til then I'd only ever used the combo of DVD Audio Extractor and SurCode - which was fine with SD DVD's, but the HD version, everything I tried wanted to convert the video (naturally) but also convert the audio. VSO's ConvertXtoDVD did the job as it allowed me to keep the DTS track intact, but downgrade the video to SD - not a problem, I wasn't interested in it anyway. Then I could rip the audio to mono WAV and rebuild in SurCode. Had I had AudioMuxer at that point it'd probably been a lot easier just ripping the audio from the MKV directly! Lesson learned for next time.

It's a shame that AudioMuxor isn't ported to Mac OS, as I recently found that DTS MAS SAS has been released to Mac, along with DVD Audio Extractor (although my license for my Windows version doesn't entitle me to use the Mac version, which is also a shame. Don't really want to spam it again, so guess I'll continue to use it on XP VM). That DTS Encoder suite is pricey though!

It's a shame I can't make DVD-Audio discs, as it'd be nice to hear the full, 8/9k, bit rate, in 96/24, rather than downsample to 44.1/24 and 1411k bit rate. I converted one of the FLAC rips to WAV and it's bit rate came out at 13.8 Mpbs! But I believe DVD-A can only handle 9.x Mbps?

Anyway, sorry for waffling, I tend to do that on forums!

Welcome!

By the way, another surround tool that's posted here is "spec", a way to convert stereo mixes to surround, so you might want to check that out as well. Works on both windows and mac.

Cheers,
Z