Isolating Dialogue from a DVD

[Robert_Neville]

What is the best way to isolate dialogue from a DVD? This question relates to removing the music and effects sound tracks; and isolating the voices from other sounds. Ideally, I prefer ripping selected soundclips rather than the whole film. Currently, I use a Sound Recorder to capture the audio from the DVD player, yet the sound clips contain excessive background noise when you adjust the volume. The audio may be tweaked in a sound editor, yet I am no sound engineer thus have trouble sweeting the audio. Let me know if you have ideas.

[chazzie]

Rip it from the DVD and isolate the 5.1 audio stream. Then demux the 5.1 stream into 6 mono wavs, now you can use the Center channel which (should) only contain the dialouge. It might contain other sounds too, but far less than a Stereo downmix.

[Donny661]

chazzie is right. rip it from the dvd (if you have a dvd drive) because it will be better if you keep the sound digital and an exact copy rather than having a d/a (digital to analog) and a/d conversions, which results in excess noise making it harder to isolate sounds. Also, speech is usually in the center channel so take only the channels that have to speech you need in the different parts of the movie and delete the excess. Sound Forge and Cool Edit are good sound editors you can use. I'm familiar with Sound Forge, but the downside to it is that it is only a stereo editor and you can't have multiple track and it is more expensive. I'd suggest you get the demo of both and play around with them; I know Sound Forge lets you use all the features, but you can't save changes with the demo.