I have 6 Wav which I would like to encode as an AC3 file. The only program to do this seems to be Soft Encode but I'm not willing to spend £1000. So are there any other freeware/cheap frograms which will handle this conversion?

It appears that a Wav file can be interleaved with 6 tracks, as I can use besweet to create such a file from an existing AC3 file. Is this Wav file directly compatible with the DVD standard and if so what audio programs are able to create a 6 channel wav file from scratch?