Audio Capture for DVD

[calhoun]

Ive connected a audio tape deck to my soundblaster live digital-in.

What is the best program for capturing audio only?

Can an audio track be authored into a DVD by itself? I want to have the DVD player show a still image and play this audio track, can this be done?

Thanks

[thecoalman]

Capturing sound isn't my thing but you can use Crwative Wav Studio to record your sound, there's probably better apps for this.

Then it's simply a matter of creating a DVD compliant mpg. Any good editor or authoring tool will allow you to insert an image in the timeline. Adjust the length of time the image is diplayed to match the time of your audio, insert your captured audio track into the timeline, encode or author to disc. You can have the video as a play first video (or intro), just don't add anything else such as chapters. You could add chapter points if you have multiple songs on the same track or multiple videos. The possibilities are endless depending on your editor.

[daamon]

Can an audio track be authored into a DVD by itself? I want to have the DVD player show a still image and play this audio track, can this be done?

Yes, it can be done.

Simply load up your image as the video source into your MPEG2 encoder, and then set the audio to to be the audio track you want. I use TMPGEnc and have done exactly this with it - I'm assuming other encoders are similar.

Because it's a still image, you'll get away with a fairly low bitrate - I don't remember what I used, but experiment to find a satisfactory setting. Don't go too high as I believe this causes jerky images, even though it's a still as the source.

Also, a low video bitrate will (should / is highly likely to) mean that you can use WAV files for your audio and so not have to compress (lose slight quality) if you're a perfectionist - as long as the quality was there in the first place (i.e. WAVs ripped from a CD). Converting (say) MP3 to WAV doesn't improve the quality.

There's also a setting or two in TMPGenc that are worth looking into to make the encode of a still picture better: "Motion Search Precision" ("Video" tab) and "No half-pixel motion" ("Quantize Matrix" tab).

See here (https://www.videohelp.com/guides.php?guideid=303#303) for a link to a guide that'll be useful in general for TMPGEnc settings, and also has a good explanation of the settings I mention above. Don't forget to rate the guide once you've used it.

Hope that helps.

[calhoun]

OK thanks guys, ill experiment a bit.

[SaSi]

There is a program called DVD+Audio creator (or similar) that accepts WAV or MP3 audio and optional images and allows you to create audio disks in DVD-Video format. No space is lost for video (apart from menus and song title cards) so it's pretty efficient.

[sacajaweeda]

Ive connected a audio tape deck to my soundblaster live digital-in.

What is the best program for capturing audio only?

Can an audio track be authored into a DVD by itself? I want to have the DVD player show a still image and play this audio track, can this be done?

Thanks

Rather than lose quality capturing the audio from the DVD, why not just rip it instead?

My $.02

[calhoun]

sacajaweeda Posted: Sep 08, 2004 18:30

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

calhoun wrote:
Ive connected a audio tape deck to my soundblaster live digital-in.

What is the best program for capturing audio only?

Can an audio track be authored into a DVD by itself? I want to have the DVD player show a still image and play this audio track, can this be done?

Thanks


Rather than lose quality capturing the audio from the DVD, why not just rip it instead?

My $.02

Dude....

Ive connected a audio tape deck to my soundblaster live digital-in...

I'm not taking audio from a DVD. I'm putting it in the DVD from an audio cassette.

Thanks to all.[/quote]

[sacajaweeda]

Yep kiddies, this is your brain on drugs.

[Cornucopia]

Actually, all DVD's MUST have some form of visual--whether video, still image, or even "black"--otherwise it isn't valid/legal DVD. But most of the apps mentioned add these. Notice that adding "black" at very low bitrates uses up much less disc space and bit budget than low bitrate/non-moving video, while an actual still image (usually used for menu's) uses the least.

Back to the original question asked:

Good audio programs that can capture sound--
CoolEdit Pro (aka Adobe Audition)
SoundForge
ProTools
Audacity (?)
many, many others

Most good video programs (Adobe Premiere, Ulead VSP/MSP, Vegas, AVID, etc) can also do audio-only capture even though they favor video.
I haven't tried but I would take a guess that even VirtualDub could do it.

Scott

[sacajaweeda]

I used VirtualVCR once to capture sound from my 4 track using my line in on my soundcard. I just captured it as an AVI with a blank blue screen with sound, and ripped the WAV with VDub. It worked, but I've since upgraded hardware & software. Now I use an Aardvark card and Cakewalk. Kinda pricey but waaaaay better than what I was using.