How To Rip High Resolution Blu-ray Audio

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. <br />

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

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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 :~)<br />

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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.<br />

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

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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?

<i>"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?"</i><br />

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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. <br />

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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!<br />

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.<br />

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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.<br />

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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.<br />

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Another program exist that can demux it all. It is called eac3to.exe.<br />

It requires the presence of Sonic HD DVD Decoder or Arcsoft TotalMedia Extreme to demux DTS-HD Master Audio/High Resoltion. <br />

It requires Nero 7 with blu-ray support for Dolby Digital+.<br />

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

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

Thanks Chris for the info<br />

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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.<br />

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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.<br />

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Any thoughts?<br />

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Thanks<br />

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Tom

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

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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<br />

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So what good is Blu Ray Audio?<br />

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I'll be glad to, let me know where to send it<br />

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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.<br />

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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.<br />

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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. <br />

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

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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.<br />

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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.<br />

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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<br />

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Which explains why Blu Ray audio needs to be ripped<br />

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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.<br />

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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:<br />

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"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.<br />

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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.<br />

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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."<br />

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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.<br />

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It demuxes to a .dts file, which nothing can play - except for the core.<br />

I am sure TrueHD will demux the same way.<br />

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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.<br />

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It's very, very satisfying.<br />

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Scott A.<br />

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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<br />

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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!