Monday 5 March 2007

Commentaries and a question

I've been listening to Michael McKenzie's excellent commentaries on Profondo Rosso and Suspiria over the weekend - they are available from his site Whiggles.com, by the way, if anyone has not already heard them - and just transferred them to my MP3 player.

This, of course, got me wondering: what is the easiest, and cheapest, way of taking a DVD with an existing commentary track, ripping it and converting it to MP3, as it is something I think I would to do with - for example - the official Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Tenebre commentaries.

7 comments:

Oli said...

I started ripping commentaries last year and have quite a large collection now.

In order to do this you will DVD Decrypter and BeSweet.

Step-by-step details can be found here:

http://forum.digital-digest.com/showthread.php?t=59156

K H Brown said...

Thanks Oliver - I'll give this a go

Anonymous said...

Are you on a Mac or PC?
On a Mac I use Yadex.

And I love your site!!
Huge fan of giallo here!

K H Brown said...

Hi Arcvile. I have Mac, Windows and Linux machines - comes with the territory when you work in computers :-)

My Mac is pretty old though, so I would probably be using Windows.

Glad you like the site.

Anonymous said...

I have no experience in ripping it from DVD as described above and the time it will take to follow that procedure but you could just record it "live" on the pc by setting the recording device on the soundcard's loopback input. I have doen this with some regular DVD audio tracks to create custom "soundrack" mp3's of films that I can't find official scores from.

Takes the same amount of time as the whole feature film and doesn't require fiddling around with software.
The resulting WAV file can be quicly and easily converted to mp3 with freeware like CDex.

2ct from a Dutch giallo/horror freak.

Anonymous said...

"Hi Arcvile. I have Mac, Windows and Linux machines - comes with the territory when you work in computers :-)

My Mac is pretty old though, so I would probably be using Windows."

Ok then cause Yadex on Mac is lighting fast and works like a charm!


Anyway, your site has become a daily religious read for me now... always been giallo addicted!

Michael said...

Hi Keith, glad to hear you're enjoying my inane ramblings!

When I transfer commentaries to my MP3 player, I use DVD Shrink (www.dvdshrink.org) to decrypt the disc to my hard drive (slightly more user-friendly in my experience than DVD Decrypter). I then use VirtualDubMod (virtualdubmod.sourceforge.net) to demux the commentary track, then convert the AC3 file it outputs to an MP3 using BeSweet (dspguru.doom9.net). It's possible that there are other quicker ways of doing it, but I've found that this works quite well for me and doesn't take too much time.