Ripping DVD-Audio

I use ArcSoft Total Media Theater but Im on PC  

I own both the CD soundtracks and the video DVDs for the Qatsi trilogy, but the DVDs have even more of Philip Glass's music in 'em, so I wanted copies for my own listening purposes when away from the TV.

To do this on my Mac, I downloaded an app called 0SEx (zero-sex, not oh-sex), which is a swiss army knife DVD data extractor. Among other things it allows you to pull the audio+video, just audio, or just video, and choose which segments of the disk to extract. The directions sheet is a little cryptic, but by poking at things you can figure it out. In the end, you'll have a stack of files in your target folder with names like "TITLE00-AN0-CH00-AUDIO0.AC3". The audio files will be whatever was on the source DVD: mono, stereo, or 5.1, usually.

Preview the tracks to make sure they're what you want. For example, there may be a short (10 second or a minute) track at the beginning that consists of the sound behind the studio titling. If the DVD has alternate language dubbing, there may also be parallel sets of audio tracks. The easy way to preview is to single-click select each file, hit the space bar, and let the Finder's embedded Preview function throw up a playback window for you, with a timeline you can scrub to speed up the checking.

If you accidentally extract the audio, video, and metadata all together, no big deal. Just delete everything but the AC3 files.

iTunes probably won't play the AC3 files you just extracted. Use an application like Max to transcode them to the audio format of your choice (I like Apple Lossless, but Max handles FLAC, AAC, MP3, and so on).

(EDIT: Max isn't handling the files I'm seeing 0SEx generate. So ignore the above advice at the moment; I'll update this post with more info when I get it.)

Most people I've talked to about this use VLC. I haven't tried that, though, but it can probably do the transcoding on the fly to audio formats other than ALAC (if you're curious, google for "dvd audio mac vlc").

Quote:

Originally Posted by tas236 

How do I rip a DVD-Audio on my Mac? I recently purchased Deodato's "Live in Rio" double CD/DVD(A/V) album (a great buy...) and am assuming that the DVD-Audio is better quality. How do I rip it, though? Thanks!

According to Amazon this is a music CD and a DVD-Video with AC3 encoded audio. I don't consider this to be DVD-Audio and the required tools are different.