How to record BGMS - Tutorial

How to rip music from DVD with 5.1 sound

In this tutorial I am going to explain step by step instruction to rip audio from DVD and editing.

Remember, recording audio from films is a time consuming and painful process.
Those who do not want to go through it please don't waste time and do not read any further.
However, for an enthusiast, this not a pain but a great fun, IMO.

Note: If the dvd that you want to rip does not contain 5.1 discrete channels then please ignore the following instructions and go
to the section "how to rip music from a VCD" below.

To know whether the DVD has 5.1 surround sound, just play it in your home theatre or PC and observe if you
are able to distinguish multiple channels. If you do not have 5.1 speakers then at least you should be able to hear stereo effect.

Please note that most of the films made before the year 2000 do not have 5.1 sound. Though most the DVDs covers printed with "DOLBY DIGITAL" (DD) 5.1 SURROUND or DD 5.1 etc..., it does
not guarantee 5.1 discrete channels. There are some few films(like Indian, Jeans) released in 90s were recorded with dts 5.1 sound but again it depends on
the DVD manufacturer whether he is selling with proper Dolby digital surround sound or not.

DTS is a widely used surround sound technology in the modern films. However when it comes to dvds the widely used format is DD. Some DVDs
also comes with dts. Some of them comes with both. It is also possible to rip music from dts. But this requires additional conversion from dts to DD ( or ac3).
In this tutorial we only discuss on DD.

About 5.1 sound

5.1 sound is basically a 6 channel track audio for surround sound effects used in the Modern Cinema. It consists of channels:
Left (L),
right (R),
center (C), or voice.
surroune left (LE),
surround right (RE)
and subwoofer channel for bass effect (W).

Center channel contains voice/dialogues and some other general sounds that we hear on streets (like vehicle horns etc). Sometimes they also heard in other channels like left or right. It depends on how the tracks were mixed in
film making depending on the scene. For example when Mahesh babu runs in the film Athadu from left side to right side, his footstep sounds starts from left channel and then center channel and slowly moves into the right and fades away.

But it is guaranteed that 90% of the dialogues of the artists are routed to this channel.
Our goal is minimize or eliminate this channel so we end up with pure music that we can enjoy later.

Note: I do not recommend complete elimination of this channel because sometimes when a background score played, some instruments are
routed to this channel. Complete elimination of this channel will make the music pale and looses its charm. But at very rare places
this channel is used for instruments. It all depends on the Sound engineer who worked for the film's dts mixing and also the DVD manufacturer
who authors the dvd. Sometimes good movies released with dts were ended up with bad quality DVDs and thus loosing the opportunity for us to record the BGMs.

Prerequisites:

1. A good dvd audio ripper. I use smartripper V2.41, a very easy to use tool. You can download this freeware from this link

2. A multichannel editor. There are many editors available. A few I know are Adobe Audition, Nero Wave Editor, Maven 3d pro etc..

None of these tools are free :( You need to shell out few bucks to buy them. You can download the trial version of Maven from their site
You might want to purchase it once you like it.

I use Maven 3d Pro because I found that it is very easy to identify and mix the channels with it. It comes with in built in DD support too.
Using this we can edit the 5.1 channels and down mix them into 2 channel stereo. It also has some capabilities like playing only a specific channel, or mute a channel etc..

3. An ac3 to wav converter called "headache" and collection of tools. Download it from here.
There are several guides available in www.videohelp.com on ac3/wav ripping,ac3 to wav conventions and what not. A good resource for audio/video enthusiasts.

4. Sony sound forge. An excellent audio editor and very user friendly. I use this to edit 2 channel files. not a free tool again. You can
download trial version from their site here.

5. A PC with 5.1 sound card and Windowx XP and with good processing speed (at least Pentium 4 or above with minimum 2.5 Ghz preferred) with at least 1 GB RAM
(more the better).

You can also live with 2 channel sound card but it might be tedious to identify and play the multi channel tracks in the
multichannel editors. It is not necessary to have 5.1 sound speakers. Because you can configure your sound card to downstream 5.1 to 2 channel speakers.

6. A good wav to mp3 compressor. I use itunes which does a fantastic job in compressing audio. You can download it from Apple's site.


First Step : Ripping ac3 audio from DVD

ac3 is a proprietary audio format of Dolby laboratories inc, a compression format for multichannel audio widely used in Films and DVDs.


1. Put the DVD into the DVD-drive and Open SmartRipper. It will automatically detects DVD and loads files from it. Now go to "Settings". Select "File Splitting" and make this "Max File Size". Under Max File Size, set this number to "9000 MB". This is a one time setting.

2. Now, go to "Stream Processing" and un-check all the video and subtitle tracks, and leave the Audio track you want to rip, checked.
Then, take that Audio track you left selected and use the option to "Save to Separate File". Once you rip now, it will rip the Audio track you want and save it as a separate file.

3. When the audio track is finally ripped, you will have Dolby AC3 audio files. You will now have to edit and down mix these into WAV files after eliminating the voice track.

Note: you can rip the entire DVD chapters into a single ac3 file. But it is very difficult to edit them in the editors. A normal scenario Indian film will have a varying lengths from 2 hrs to 3.5 hrs. So always club 3 to 4 chapter in a row and rip them into a single ac3 file. It is useful if you name the file with chapter numbers. In other words rip an ac3 file from chapter 1 to 4 and another from 5 to 8 and so on. I recommend limiting the total length of chapters to around 15 mins. While selecting the chapters you can see the total length shown in smartripper.

Once ripped you can see some file as below...

athidhi_chp_1-4_([0x80]_Audio_Not_Specified_AC3(6Ch)_48kHz___)_Delay_-18ms.ac3


Second step : convert 6ch ac3 into 6ch wav

Open headac3he and load the ac3 file and go to options , select all 6 channels and press convert.
It is a bit of pain to setup headac3he and get it work because it requires some other codecs/tools like azid,lame etc..
For more info on how to use install and use headac3he , please visit http://forum.doom9.org it has several forums discussing on this tool.

Note: You can also use headache to down mix 5.1 wav file back to a 2 ch wav by un-selecting the center channel to eliminate voice. However it might lead to pale charmless sound as I mentioned below. So I recommend to edit the channels as mentioned below.


Third step : Editing and Down mixing 5.1 sound into 2 channel wav files.

1. Now we are ready with 6 channel wav files which needs editing. Open Maven 3d Pro, choose a new 5.1 sound project, import the wav file into it.
You can see 6 channels each named like L, LE R , RE etc, you can see one of the channel named as "C" which is a center channel.
Now keep playing this file and eliminate dialogues wherever necessary in the C channel.

2. Once this process is over, go to mix->select "mix to new channel"->select "2 channel" and press OK. Now a 2 track audio file created for you
without dialogues. This requires further editing to eliminate unwanted sounds.

NOTE: Though Maven 3d supports native ac3 file importing, it is very slow and often crashes.


Fourth step : Final editing of 2.1 ch wav files

1.Using Sony sound forge, open the 2-channel wav file and remove the unwanted sounds and blank spaces. cut and save the files as per movies theme. You can
club the music as per situation, mood etc.. Try to limit each track's length to 6 to 7 mins of length max. Some audio Cd players can't play
large files properly.

Now we are done with final set of wav files which we call "BGM" tracks :).
Note: Do not save the files in an mp3 format in all the above steps because it compresses the audio and they can not be edited any further.
If you edit an mp3 file, it further degrades the audio quality.


Fifth step:

Using Itunes, covert the wav files into mp3 at a higher bit rate. I generally use 190 to 360 kbps with VBR option on(variable bitrate).
Now your background tracks are ready to enjoy !!


How to rip music from a VCD.

Ripping audio from VCD is quite easy job because it contains just two channel stereo. In fact most of the VCDs have mono sound.

You just need an audio recording software like nero wave editor or Adobe audition or Sony sound forge. Just play the vcd in your PC and
press record button in your audio application wherever you hear some good background score. After this you can edit your files to remove
unwanted portions like dialogues. You need to configure your sound recording from Control panel to "Stereo mix" mode.

The bad thing is we have to sacrifice some of the music due to the dialogue overlay. It is not possible to eliminate voice track from VCDs :(
Similarly if the DVD contains mono sound, it is as good as a VCD. So, same process is applicable.

Hope this is helpful to you.