xVCD audio album

[wcb4]

just out of curiosity....

I know that it is possible to create still photo slideshows on a vcd. I also know that it is possible to do menus and submenus etc. The audio on a vcd (224) is also cd quality, but considerably smaller, and even smaller if you go with 192 which is almost indistinguishable. The question is this:

is it possible to create audio only vcds, no video, to store 2-3 hours of audio on a disc. maybe with menus. I ask this because, even though my dvd player will play mp3s (where I can get about 8-9 hours on a disc) the menu is limited to 8 character file names. I would love to be able to make nice graphic menus to navigate to one of two or three albums on a disc and then to the song and actually be able to have the album cover as the background to the menu. Has anyone ever tried this? Is it possible. I realize that it would be out of spec, only audio and 192kbps or 224kbps audio, but this would serve my needs very nicely. Any clue?

[volleypotato]

It is possible to have audio playing with a still. vcdimager allows this, I've tried it, and it works. The demo disc created by vitualis that you can download from the vcdimager site has an example of an audio segment.

[Chopper Face]

I would assume that if your player supports XVCD it would just be a matter of pumping the video bit rate down really low to something like 50k/s or even lower and having blank or almost blank video. Cool idea. I'm curious to try it out as I don't believe my player supports .mp3s.

[wcb4]

So...any of you folks know enough about vcdimager's xml to make a menu system for the following.
A menu showing 2 album titles, with a picture in the background (call it main menu)maybe the two albums would be "Dark Side Of The Moon" and "Delicate Sound Of Thunder"
I Choose one of the albums and get to see a menu screen with a new background call it "darkside" with the text one it showing the titles of the songs, 6 to a screen with next and previous included, the album having 13 songs). I Select "Money" and I get a background screen showing the prism from the cover (call this background "money&quot and maybe some text telling the name of the song and its release date.
If I choose song 3 (whatever it might be), The album will begin playing from song three and when it hits the end of this album, it continues on to "delicate sound of thunder".

Sure I might only get two or three albums to a cd, but its more compact than regular cds, and I don't loose the album covers If anyone does this..please post your xml.

[Chopper Face]

Acording to the bit rate calculator: http://www.vcdhelp.com/calc.htm you should get about 412 minutes (over 5 and a half CDs) of 224kb/s audio if you somehow pull off a video bit rate of 0kb/s. Going for ultimate sound quality of 384kb/s will give you 248 minutes (about 3 and a third CDs). Not too shabby. So what a good utility for ripping .mp2s or would it be easier to encode the XVCD straight out in TMPGEnc from a .wav?

[wcb4]

basically this kind of "audio only" vcd or xvcd could or would be a three level deep menu structure where the bottom level does not really link to anything.

menu 1 - album title
menu 2 - song form the album
menu 3 - background screen showing name of song, maybe
album cover or whatever, audio track of the song
playing and when finished, automatically move to
the bottom level menu of the next song.

Sounds like an interesting project to tackle once I figure out how to use vcd toolkit or vcdimager and have some more time on my hands. If anyone else manages to pull this off first, let me know

[wcb4]

I think I am almost to the point of making my very first vcd album. For testing purposes, I'm just going to use 5 second audio clips, probably 3 albums and the menus associated. If anyone is interested, once I confirm that it works, I will make the source files and xml available (just not sure where to put them) I think this idea is a great workaround for people who have dvd players that will play vcds but not MP3s (not everyone owns an apex ) And will have the added advantage of not having to loose album cover art or deal with 8 character file names. Should have some results over the weekend at latest

WCB4 - any luck on this?