Has anyone made audio-only DVDs? (1 Viewer)

[John_Berger]

I could probably answer this if I actally RTFM for my DVD software, but I figured that I'd ask if anyone else has tried this.
I was going to make MP3 CDs of most of my Christmas CDs for the upcoming holiday, but my primary DVD player is not MP3 compatible. (I bought it for its progressive scan features without even considering MP3 disc compatibility.)
So, since one DVD is the equivalent to 6-7 CD-Rs, I figured that I'd made a DVD with nothing but music. I use DVDit Professional Edition 2.5, but I also have Ulead's DVD MovieFactory and DVD Workshop, so I can use any of these three to do this.
Has anyone tried this? If so, how did you do it? Did you make an MPEG-2 with black for the video and a mega-low bit rate? Did you make an entire album its own audio file which is then accessible from a menu?
Ideas are appreciated.

 

[Wayne Bundrick]

I haven't tried it but here's what I know. I only have DVDit PE so I don't know if the others make it easier to do this. In DVDit PE you don't have to make a black MPEG2 video file, you can drag an audio file into a menu so it would cost only a still picture in terms of video. But you probably wouldn't be happy with that. There seems to be no elapsed time counter, you can't navigate from one song to another, and I don't think you can even do fast forward or rewind, it's intended to just be background music for a menu. So I'd probably end up adding the audio as a whole album to an 80 minute clip of black. You can add chapter points to each song so previous/next buttons act like they should, although in DVDit PE it's a major pain in the ass to place chapter points.

Don't forget, you'll have to convert the audio from 44.1k to 48k.

 

[John_Berger]

I was thinking about just using a black screen to obviously prevent burn-in. I was also thinking about using an entire album as a chapter as well. Looks like we're on the same wavelength.
Now, the big question - are there any freebie utilities that will rip a CD as an entire 48 KHz .WAV file? The ones that I find are almost entirely 1 song = 1 .WAV file.
If worse comes to worst, I'll just do what my one sister did many years ago and dump the audio to a VHS tape with no video. Same thing, lower quality, but it still works.

 

[Rob Gillespie]

John,
Exact Audio Copy (EAC) can rip a CD as one big .wav. I'm not sure about the 48khz though. I think you'd need to run it through something else to convert it up.

Rob

 

[John_Berger]

That's cool. I have audio editors that handle 48KHz with normalization functions so that all of the CDs can be at the same volume level. I'll be glad to work on 20 or so album files as opposed to 300-400 individual files.