How To Rip High Resolution Blu-ray Audio

I'm not sure why you would want to rip blu-rays? - except maybe to rip them off! We have all ripped CD's that may or may not have belonged to us. To me it makes sense to take the digital off the blu-ray and run it through your DAC of choice. How much does that cost? At most a few hundred $. Granted SPDIF is not great! For now it is good. Until then there are other options that are more accessible such as packet delivered WiFi such as the Transporter. I have no problem "investing" in a decent blu-ray player so I can get the high res stuff now. I can download 24 bit audio if I really want it on my computer. I think it is a bit of overreaction to feel that the data needs to be ripped. We will get there some day. As with all digital. By then it will be a mute point because the physical disk will be dead. Enjoy your blu-ray now while it still exists! Things change quickly!

Eric

Hi Eric - As a music lover and audiophile I think ripping Blu-ray is wonderful. Please let me know where you can find Neil Young content at 24/192 that is not on Blu-ray. The same goes for all the high resolution concerts like the Dave Matthews concert I ripped for this article. I realize you can download some hugh resolution material right now, but the selection is far to limited.

The more music the better and when it's high resolution it's hard to top.

Plus having this all without the limitations of a dedicated Blu-ray player and being able to use a real high end DAC is fabulous.

Why rip? Because my music server is two stories below where I'm sitting and it's a pain to change the disks every 45 minutes.

I did this exact same thing a few months ago for this exact same disc, I then edited the massive .wav file, cut out all of his talking between tracks, and created single .wav files for each track then converted them to flac. Worked out pretty well; I just did it for a higher fidelity version than the CD. It's 48hz 2.0 PCM, love it.

Fabulous ruffuford! The higher res version is exactly what I am after as well. Editing the massive WAV is something I need to do, but for now there are bigger fish to fry :~)

Thanks for the post.

Wow, it's not so simple, but when someone else has done all the hard work for you, it all looks so easy doesn't it? What a pain that the SATA ports on the Mac are only for OSX use. Apple must have a real bee in its bonnet about Blu-ray, although PC notebooks with BD are slowly coming to the fore, not in droves but enough to give you a reasonably wide choice now.

So..... how long did it take to click "start ripping" until it was cooked? May have have to invest in a long backup UPS?

General Question. The ripped AIFF file was 2.4GB. Depending on the sound editor application, which varies widely, how much RAM would you need to open that file, to mark, edit & save and not having to twiddle the fingers at the progress bar? Or would this be processor dependant as well? What would be a workable combination of RAM and Processor speed?

"General Question. The ripped AIFF file was 2.4GB. Depending on the sound editor application, which varies widely, how much RAM would you need to open that file, to mark, edit & save and not having to twiddle the fingers at the progress bar? Or would this be processor dependent as well? What would be a workable combination of RAM and Processor speed?"

The amount of RAM doesn't have to be incredibly huge. I think 2 GB is a minimum but the more the better. I also think any dual core processor or better will work fine. As long as you aren't editing video this is the hardest task for a computer.

The time it takes to do this all varies. The Dave Matthews Disc was about 40 GB and probably took a couple hours to decrypt and copy to the hard drive (one step though). Then about 30 minutes to demux the audio from the huge m2ts file.

Thanks very much for this useful article and for the hard work gone in the process!
Vince

Very nice guide! I've been slowly moving my physical discs (DVDs, CDs, and HD/BDs alike) onto a portable Hard Disk I have until I've got a suitable server built. While trying to rip HD DVDs into lossless formats for playback, I did find that you can use eac3to to convert the demuxed output into files or formats of your choice; personally, I've converted the lossless audio tracks on my movies into FLAC format rather than WAV, just to cut down on space used. It's something worth looking into, and eac3to is remarkably fast I've found: it auto-detects the input bit-depth and sampling rate, and will convert it into whatever you name the file as (Including DD and DTS with proper encoding libraries, in case you need to downsample the audio for whatever reason). It'll even work on Dolby TrueHD and (possibly) DTS-HD MA/HR.

Worth looking into! Now if only my extenders would play nice with Matroska Containers and FLAC files...

This can be done on Linux too using dumphd instead of AnyDVD.

Hi ggking7 - I tried dumpHD during this project, but had many problems with it. I love the fact it is a Java app and can run on any OS that supports Java, but the difficulty of using it was a downer for me. Hopefully it was just my experience!

I have to admit I had major problems setting it up, but I eventually got it working. What kind of problems are you having?

When I put the Mac OS X encryption table / file (AAC?) in the directory of the dumphd the program quits as soon as it's launched.

There are three kinds of lossless blu-ray audio tracks: LPCM, TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio. LPCM is not a problem to demux, but I am pretty sure the others will demux core only with tsMuxer. The core is usually a 640/1536 kbps DD/DTS track.

Additionally there are three high bitrate lossy codes: DTS-HD, DTS-HD High Resolution and Dolby Digital+. DTS-HD is usually full bitrate normal DTS and should not be a problem. DTS-HD High Resolution will probably demux core only and Dolby Digital+ is probably not supported.

Another program exist that can demux it all. It is called eac3to.exe.
It requires the presence of Sonic HD DVD Decoder or Arcsoft TotalMedia Extreme to demux DTS-HD Master Audio/High Resoltion.
It requires Nero 7 with blu-ray support for Dolby Digital+.

eac3to.exe is command line only, but I am sure someone has made a gui.

eac3to.exe has it's home on the doom9.net forums.

Thanks Chris for the info

FYI I bought the NY box and also picked up the new OPPO BR player because I needed a decent player and the OPPO seemingly is a universal player. I also have a computer with a Lynx card and a Berekey Alpha Dac. Interesting enough I bought the Oppo to bypass the hassles of ripping BR audio and to simply have a stand alone player to output to the BAD.

All this seems simple enough but I have run into some hiccups. The Oppo puts out perfect data for all my other DVD-A discs and DVD-V discs yet the data output from the BR audio is only 48K. Tried all the configurations for the Oppo to no avail.

Any thoughts?

Thanks

Tom

Hi Tom - I think you can thank Sony and it's Blu-ray hardware requirements for the 48k limit.

Let me know if you're interested in sending one of the NY disks to me. I'd love to give ripping one a shot before I purchase the whole box :~)

Chris

So what good is Blu Ray Audio?

I'll be glad to, let me know where to send it

Tom

Neil Young's appreciation of hi-res music is well documented. Based on that, it would have been nice if he just stuck 24/192 tracks on an HDAD DVD audio and made it a lot easier for all of us (himself included). I guess he thought we needed to see his films too so he went with blue-ray.

I've run into the same limitation on my Sony blue-ray player. I can't output more than 24/48. For example John Mayer's blue ray says it has 24/96 PCM but it outputs 24/48 from the Sony.

I like the CODE project approach. Give you everything: MP3, redbook CD and 24/96 WAV files all easily ripped for the price of a CD. That's user friendly.

Thanks for the info Chris. It looks promising if your PC has the horse-power

More than likely, it's something wrong with the settings on the player side if you're getting 24/48 instead of 24/96 or higher. HDMI can be confusing once you get into the nitty gritty settings of the spec, though assuming your player can output bitstream (it should be able to) and your receiver is HDMI 1.3a+ with the ability to decode the audio codecs at proper resolution, you should go that route. If, however, you have a player that can decode TrueHD and DTS-HD MA, it may be worth it to decode on the player and pass 7.1 channel 24/192 audio as LPCM. Only HDMI 1.3 or newer receivers/processors can decode the lossless codecs, though many players are dropping lossless decoding support on-board when they can to cut costs, relying instead on bitstream support since most consumer receivers support it or can decode the lossy cores of the soundtracks.

For everyone having 24/96 or 24/192 mixes sampled down to 24/48, check your settings -very- carefully. HDMI is a powerful, if "dumb" spec.

EDIT: This assumes you're using HDMI. Analog and SPDIF outputs on BD decks are subject to DRM and/or connection restrictions, including a no-analog-video support starting in 2013 (So all you CRT Projector owners without HDMI or HDCP, get your decks now!)

The blue ray is going to my 2 channel only DAC so I use SPDIF not HDMI and I think that's what Sony limits on the player (not limited in the Blue ray spec).

thus there is no way to utilize 192/24 from Blu Ray via coax to a listener's preferred dac

Which explains why Blu Ray audio needs to be ripped

Tom

eac3to is an excellent Windows-only program as mentioned, but slightly older-than-latest versions do work on Linux via wine. I know version 3.0.2 does work via wine and 3.15 does not.

Chris, that's aacskeys. On Linux the compiled library is called libaacskeys.so. Do you know what version of aacskeys you tried? The latest is 0.4.0a which is the same as 0.4.0 for our purposes. I found some info on OS X support here:

"Due to the nature how Mac OS X handles low level I/O operations there are some remarks and open issues. aacskeys can use 2.5 paths to communicate with the drive. First it can use exclusive access to send commands to the drive, this has some drawbacks however so this needs to be enabled explicit by using the command line switch --exclusive-io. You can't get exclusive access easily because Finder will grab the drive when a disc gets inserted, to overcome this problem aacskeys unmounts the disc, this requires root rights currently. This has the side effect that as soon as aacskeys releases the drive Finder grabs it again and autorun gets started. This access path provides the same features as aacskeys has under windows and linux, the only benefit of using it is that only this path allows the usage of the XBox hack, there are no other advantages currently.

The non-exclusive path does not have these problems and is used by default. The 0.5 path results from a technical problem. I have tested aacskeys with two drives, a XBox drive and a LG-GGW-H20L. To get exclusive access and to query the drives firmware version and AACS features aacskeys needs to create a driver plugin (CFPlugIn) to communicate with the drive. For some unknown reason it cannot create one for the XBox drive, but everything else works so aacskeys emulates the commands and returns fake data. You can see if this path is used if the reported firmware version is F0BA and the AACS version is 0. I don't know if this happens only because my Mac is virtual, if anyone knows how to solve this problem im open for suggestions.

The archive contains quad universal binaries for Mac OS X, however only the two intel flavors were tested, i don't have access to a non-intel Mac. They should work but i would appreciate it if someone could test them on a non-intel Mac."

Let me know if it's still a no-go and I'll do some more digging.

I just ripped a disk and demuxed a DTS-HD Master Audio track.

It demuxes to a .dts file, which nothing can play - except for the core.
I am sure TrueHD will demux the same way.

Thus eac3to.exe is the only way to convert TrueHD and DTS-HD etc to LPCM.

This isn't exactly on topic, but I've been able to listen to a couple of volumes of Archives in both cd and blu-ray format, and even putting bd through my very modest system I can hear a difference - and not a small one. My ears just aren't that good, but the increase in (stereo weasel word approaching) 'presence' jumps out at me.

It's very, very satisfying.

Scott A.

I know your busy, but could you please send me a few seconds worth of one of the .m2ts files as a test sample? I looked at the specs of my black box and it says it wll play it! I asume from other tests that it has to be a file that ran through anydvd to work though. I have nothing bluray around here and my anydvd is only for standard dvds. I have a feeling it will stream the full 24/192 via my hdmi output! As always I will post my findings

let me know

I stumbled across this site because I actually own the exact same BR disc (Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds live) and was hoping to be able to send the music to my ipod. Someone asked why you would rip a BR disc and this is the reason - so I don't have to buy the exact same songs again just to listen to them while away from home. After reading your experience, I will not be putting in the time or money to do this, but now know to not buy a concert in BR since I won't be able to transfer the songs to my ipod. Thanks for the info!

I was disappointed to read in the Positive Feedback review of the NYA vol. 1 box that the recording process included down sampling to 24/96 from the initial 24/192 transfers, and then upsampled back to 24/192 for the blu ray release! Apparently the true resolution will only be 24/96 (if Positive Feedback is correct). I guess the 24/96 DVD versions will result in audio performance as good as 24/192.
Thanks to Chris for figuring out how to rip from blu ray though, seems to be a lot of work!

barrows wrote:

NYA discs
I was disappointed to read in the Positive Feedback review of the NYA vol. 1 box that the recording process included down sampling to 24/96 from the initial 24/192 transfers, and then upsampled back to 24/192 for the blu ray release! Apparently the true resolution will only be 24/96 (if Positive Feedback is correct). I guess the 24/96 DVD versions will result in audio performance as good as 24/192.

@barrows:

a bit more careful reading and you will understand that the 24/96 downsampling is only associated with the Plangent Processes pitch/speed restoration on the Riverboat Sessions live disc. also, GIYF.

I don't know where this information came from but it is incorrect, no offense. We worked from (and delivered back) both 192/24 and 176.4/24 versions of the dewowed and pitch-corrected masters of Riverboat. There was no downsampling here (or at Redwood as far as I know). As a matter of fact, unless the client insists otherwise we recommend and almost invariably operate at 192/24 for all work.

Jamie Howarth
Plangent Processes.

Hi Jamie - Very cool, thanks for the correct information.

Jamie, thanks for responding here and clarifying this. The Positive Feedback review stated that the downsampling was necessary in order to do the pitch correction. I am happy to find out that they were in error, and that you can do this process at 24/192, preserving the original resolution. As consumers, we must be wary of what is marketed to us as high resolution from the record companies, no fault of yours of course, but there have been many cases of even 16/44.1 files just being upsampled (often to DSD for SACD release). Hi Fi Plus reported that the re-mastering process for the latest Genesis box set went like this: analog-24/192-24/96 for mixing/editing-DSD for SACD release.
Now, we can only hope that record companies will be explicit about revealing the nature of the recording process, and the resolution maintained throughout the process.

Here is a link to the Positive-Feedback review (very positive):
http://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue44/young.htm

jamie, +1 on appreciation for providing correct info; the pfo assertion re plangent @ 24/96 did seem somewhat odd given other available info wrt the NYA team's transfer/mastering work (and the conversation i was fortunate to have with you back at AES SF following the Forensic Audio session ;) )

fyi there is another published source closely-related to all-things-Neil which has this particular info incorrect (and perhaps was a contributing factor to the pfo article content?); you might wish to alert them to the error: http://www.thrasherswheat.org/2009/05/nya-question-of-moment-riverboat.html

I followed all the instructions and got a 40g wav file of the Dave Matthews disk, but I can't play the file in media monkey. When I open the file in Media Monkey it just sits there. Any ideas? Thanks.

This is brilliant. Thank you for all the hard work in uncovering this.

Question:

During the conversion process into .WAV using either tsMuxeR or eac3to, is there a potential for loss of quality? Is it a bit for bit perfect copy?

Thanks.

Make sure the LPCM rate limit is set at 192k in the Oppo menu, and Secondary Audio must be Off.

Or use HDMI. Make sure the component connected to the Oppo can actually process 192k input.

Or use the analog outputs. The internal DACs are excellent, especially on the dedicated stereo output.

If you like classical, try the 192k BR sampler from 2L called Nordic Sounds. Best recorded sound I've ever heard.

Hi Chris. I came across this thread whilst looking for info on the Dave Matthews blu-ray - nice post. I had also posted a how-to thread on this same topic over on the Linn forums (http://forums.linn.co.uk/bb/showthread.php?tid=2544). One issue you may come across (or may have already come across) is the limit that the wav format has of 4Gb file size. You wouldn't have run into it with the 48KHz Dave Matthews disc but you probably will with 96KHz titles (I did with John Mayer) and you almost certainly will with 192KHz titles such as Neil Youngs discs. I 'avoided' the problem with John Mayer as the main track was in two separate m2ts stream files so I did them separately. It will depend on how the main title is handled on the disc.

If you've found a way around this, I'd like to hear it. One way would be to avoid using wav and use something like RF64 format, then convert that to something that your player can handle once you've split it. I haven't tried this yet as I haven't had time to look for a decent, free RF64 editor for splitting the files. I used goldwave to split my wav files for the John Mayer disc but this doesn't do RF64 format...

Hi thodo - Thanks for the post. I kind of remember looking into the 4GB issue. I believe it's possible to use the WAV64 format to get around this. Do you know if this works?

Actually, W64 (Wave64) was what I meant to type in my post - not RF64. No I haven't tried it as I hadn't found an editor to handle W64 to do the splitting (other than Sony Soundforge which is a little out of my price range for this sort of mucking around). I found a converter to get it from W64 to flac but as I had no W64 material to play around with yet I haven't tried the converter either. Can try and dig up a link to the converter if you need it.

Have just been fiddling about with eac3to and goldwave.

Both flac and RAW PCM can be output by eac3to and neither have limitations with filesize (not from eac3to anyway).

Have tried a RAW PCM file and a FLAC file, both from eac3to, in Goldwave and it can handle them fine. Still need to test with a files equivalent to a >4Gb wav they shouldn't work. Just need to spend half a day extracting some 192kHz audio to try.

Well, I seem to have answered my own question lol...

I actually own the Neil Young blu-ray disks.
Following this "How to" I got stuck here:
5. ... browse to the largest m2ts file located in the newly created STREAM directory.
6. ... the Tracks section of tsMuxeR select the audio version desired.

tsMuxeR is pretty useless here as the Neil Young disks contain in the STREAM folder about 300 *.m2ts files. Out of these 300 files maybe 40% contain 2 channel 24/192 audio data. In tsMuxeR you can open only one file at a time, if available you select then the 24/192 audio data for each file... you have to do this ca. 300 times. As a result you will end up with ca 0.4 x 300 = 120 files ... and you have no clue in which order to put (glue) them together.

Much more successful is the following (I am on Windows):
use eac3to with a nice GUI (BD Clown). The package is freeware and can be downloaded from here: clownbd.com
you don't even need AnyDVD. Let BD Clown read directly from the STREAM folder on the blu-ray disk.
It's easy to setup, choose the 24/192 audio and nothing else except the chapter info. Your output is a wave (and a wav64) file as well as a text file which provides you with the chapter times (song times).
The wave files for the Neil Young disks are between ca. 3.5GB and 4.4GB. You can then use a wave editor (I am using Samplitude) and the information from the chapter.txt file to create the single tracks. With Samplitude I save these tracks as 24/192 flac files. I have no problem to open a wave file (not talking about wav64), which is greater than 4GB with samplitude. I am sure, it works with other wave editors too. By the way, foobar plays wave files greater than 4GB without any problems.

eac3to (and its guis) definitely simplify the process as you can select the playlist files on the disc that then tell the gui which m2ts files go together to play the disc (for some discs this is a single m2ts file, for some its lots, like Neil Young must be). ClownBD lets you choose which playlist you want to rip (if there is only one, it just chooses it automatically which I suspect is the case with the Neil Young discs Urs has tried).

Having had a quick play around with ClownBD, one appears to have a useful feature that will spilt the audio stream for you using the chapter information (so no need to do this manually in a wav editor). It does seem to do it by creating the wav first though so not sure if that gets around the >4Gb wav file issue. Have not tried this feature myself.

Incidentally, I'd be very surprised Urs if the 4.4Gb file you created plays correctly in its entirety - I've created >4Gb files before that seemed to work but found that only part of the file worked. It is the header of the wav file that is the problem, it can only store the header info for up to 4Gb so I am guessing that any info that is in the file >4Gb has no header info for it (which am guessing could cause problems). Anyway, seems there ways to avoid the 4Gb issue anyway (e.g. extract to FLAC or RAW PCM ).

As for not needing AnyDVD for Neil Young - if this is the case then that Blu-ray disc does not have any copy protection on it, which is definitely not the norm for BDs. John Mayer's "Where the Light Is" and Foo Fighters 'Live at Webley Stadium" definitely both will not rip without AnyDVD to get around the copy protection...

AnyDVD: what I wrote in my previous post was misleading. Let me rephrase it:
It is NOT necessary to "Right click the AnyDVD HD icon in the Windows system tray and select Rip Video DVD to Harddisk." It is sufficient to have AnyDVD running and active. Then you can read with BD Clown directly from the STREAM folder on the blu-ray disk.

Though there is a promising option in BD Clown (split output based on chapters), it doesn't help. I always end up with one large wave file.

I still can't find any problem with this 4.4GB (it's 4.35 actually) wave file. (Samplitude 11, Windows 7). But I will look further into this. This means I haven't yet listened concentrated from the beginning to the end. But Samplitude and foobar show the correct length. Both play at least the beginning and the end error free. Samplitude lets me split into tracks and convert to FLAC without moaning.

Thanks for the article ! It's really usefull

I realize this is an old thread, but just in case people still follow it...

It is not necessary to have Any-DVD. There is a free program called MakeMKV that will rip the Blu-Ray to an mkv file, which you can then demux with TSMuxer.

Also, with ATI 5XXX series video cards, it is now possible to do bitperfect streaming of the HD audio (DD True-HD, DTS-MA, etc). A really good guide for this can be found here > http://www.mediasmartserver.net/2010/02/02/guide-setting-up-bitstreaming...

If you want true streaming of LPCM and FLAC files (without Windows mixer interfering), see this guide > http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=152520

Finally, there is another program which some may find useful, called multiAVCHD. It has a feature which will create audio-only AVCHD files - technically, it adds a still image to audio streams to create playable files of smaller size than the original BluRay. If you want to have HD audio tracks, without taking up the hdd space that the full video takes up, it's an excellent tool.