I have 5 DVD-Audio discs that I really wanted to get ripped. What I had really wanted was a way to directly pull the lossless digital signals off and downmix them to 2.0 at 16/44 so I could make a traditional audio CD of them so I could take them into the car, and then rip those so I could have WMAs on hand on the PC. (Hint to the industry: If you want SACD or DVD-A to succeed long term, you absolutely must provide hybrid discs with both the high resolution audio as well as 2.0 16/44 that’s playable on traditional CD players!)
I didn’t find any of the conventional ripping programs even recognized the DVD-A track. They were able to find LPCM, Dolby Digital, and/or DTS when it was present. I did have success using DVD Decrypter to get the Dolby Digital tracks off, and HeadAC3he to downmix the 5.1 16/48 into 2.0 16/44. What you get is one giant .ac3 file, which is then turned into one giant .wav file that needs to be split. My editor of choice for .wav files is Sound Forge XP Studio from Sonic Foundry.
However, one disc (Queen’s “A Night at the Opera”) does not have Dolby Digital. It has LPCM at 2.0 96/24 which would be perfect, but I can’t find any way to read it (it comes off as a .wav file, but nothing will play it or downmix it that I’ve found). It also has DTS at 5.1 96/24, but I couldn’t find anything that would downmix it to a 2.0 16/44 .wav file. So this one stymies me when all the others have been succesfully converted. Anybody know of anything that’ll directly consume a DTS stream (a .dts file) and do the 2.0 16/44 downmix and downconvert?