I recently won a DVD of Eric Clapton live in concert at Montreux (thank you Virgin Classic Rock). This was from the 1986 world tour (the first time I took my wife to see Eric at the Royal Albert Hall) and, IMHO, the best he’s been for years. Now I like listening to music in my car and, as this concert isn’t available on CD, I wanted to copy the sound track onto CD. After some hunting around the Internet I found this article by Craig Clontz of AREA450. Unfortunately, it was a little out of date and I couldn’t find one of the pieces of software mentioned – but I did find another that would replace it. So here’s my way of ripping a DVD soundtrack and putting it onto CD (well 2 CD’s in this case). You will need the following software

• SmartRipper
• DGDecode available as part of DGMPGDec
• Audacity
• Audio CD burning software (I use Roxio Easy Media Creator)

SmartRipper, DGDecode and Audacity are all free! You will also need a PC with a DVD-ROM and a CD writer. It’s probably a good idea at this time to create a temporary project directory for keeping all the files that are going to be created.

The steps

• Rip the VOBs (video/audio files) from the DVD to your PC hard disk
• Extract the audio track from the VOBs and convert the sample rate to audio CD specification. This will result in a large(!) wav file.
• Edit the WAV file into individual tracks (if you want/need to), adjust the volume of the tracks and create the fade-in and fade-out for each track (if you want).

Rip the VOBs

Put your DVD into the DVD drive on your PC. Run SmartRipper. Ignore any warning or error message to do with ASP-Adaptor. However, if you get “Some files are still locked! Try to unlock with a player”, then you need to quit SmartRipper and run your DVD player software to show the DVD for a couple of minutes, then re-run SmartRipper. This will bring up the SmartRipper screen.

Before doing anything else, I suggest changing a few of the settings. Click on the “Settings” tab. In Key-Check, select “once” otherwise you’re going to be asked to locate a key at intervals during the rip. Although the key can be found automatically, you have to initiate the search, so you can’t just start the rip and go and have a cup of coffee (or 2). In File-Splitting the default is “every vob-file”. I had a problem with this, the first 15 minutes of the sound track was completely quiet, so I tried “every chapter”. This worked, it created a WAV file for each chapter on the DVD – for this concert, this was good because it meant a WAV file for each song, avoiding the necessity of splitting the WAV file later for individual tracks on the CD Leave everything else and click “OK”. Now navigate the “Target” path to your project directory and click “Start”. SmartRipper will start running. Now would be a good time to make that cup of coffee or have lunch. Once the ripping is complete you can shut down SmartRipper.

Extract the audio tracks

Run DGIndex from the DGDecode package. Use the File/Open menu option to select the VOBs you created with SmartRipper. In the file list window check that the files are in the right order and click “OK”.

On the DGIndex window, set  “Audio”/”Output Method” to “Decode AC3 Track to WAV”, the rest of the defaults should all be OK, so click File/Save Project and select the location to save it. This will create 1 very large WAV file of the entire sound track. If you want to create separate tracks for each chapter, just convert 1 VOB at a time.

Edit the audio file

Start Audacity and open the WAV file that you’ve just created – this will take a few minutes. There is loads of documentation available for what you can do with Audacity, but in the case of this CD I needed to trim the beginning and end off, boost the overall amplitude of the remaining bit of the WAV file (Edit/Select/All, Effect/Amplify), split the track in the middle and add a fade out to the first half and a fade in to the second. I saved these as 2 WAV files and used my CD burning software to burn 2 CDs. Voila, one DVD soundtrack that I can listen to in my car.

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