Intrada Soundtrack Forum

Here's some techtalk, as Doug would say in his liner notes...

Years ago, the Superman The Movie DVD presented for the first time ever John Williams' isolated score in Dolby Digital Surround 5.0. The mix was greatly done and there was no volume variations or whatsoever, but the AC3 384 kbps compression was a bit too lossy for a demanding hifi system. For the Blu-Ray edition, Warner decided to keep the same glorious surround mix and improve the quality of the compression with a Dolby 640 kbps bitrate, which is very close to a PCM quality, thanks to the very effective Dolby compression system. The only problem is still... the editing issues (savage cuts) in the picture and the blanks between tracks.



So I managed to extract the complete music without any loss and converted the whole into separate uncompressed PCM files. After having edited the little imperfections in the film presentation of the score, included the unused music available in 5.0 and increased the level of the rear channels (the surround mixers tend to lower them too much to my taste), I decided to encode the final result in DTS 5.0 at a 1234 kbps bitrate, to be able to burn everything as DTS CDs. The only loss I had to deal with is downgrading the frequency from 48 kHz to 44 kHz (in order to put it on CD which doesn't tolerate more than 44 kHz), which is not a big deal ! The result is a stunning double DTS-CD presenting 2 hours of Superman music in glorious 5 channels surround. The LSO has rarely sounded so good, especially when you consider the age of the original multitracks tapes.

In addition to all the music already mixed in surround on the Blu-Ray, I made a personal surround mix of Maureen McGovern's song (which wasn't included on the Blu-Ray or the DVD) with the help of software filters. Very classic mix : voice on the center channel, reverberations in the rear channels, not as discrete as the Blu-Ray mix, but still...



Thanks to Warner Bros for releasing this music on Blu-Ray and John Williams' talented mixers for creating this multichannel epic presentation of one of the greatest scores ever composed.

Have you considered using DiscWelder Bronze (it's about $85) to burn a 5.1 DVD-A disc. The basic Bronze version allows up to 48K 24 bit 5.1 surround files.

I thought about burning a DVD-A but my software's (DVD Audio Creator) highest bitrate for Dolby Digital is 448 kbps and it wasn't possible to exploit the 640 kbps files from the Blu-Ray without the loss. DVD Audio Creator doesn't support DTS.

What's the highest bitrate DiscWelder can support ? And does it support DTS ? Thanks !

It can support 48K 24 bit for up to 5.1 channels or for stereo up to 192K 24 bit. It doesn't support DTS. But there are more advanced versions (and more expensive).

http://www.minnetonkaaudio.com/index.ph ... &Itemid=93

You can preserve the ENTIRE 640kbps Dolby Digital source or your custom PCM 5.1 files and burn it to a DVD-R with freeware alone.

All you would need is a program called multiAVCHD and an accurate chapter / track time list.

With additional free programs it can utilize (and I do mean freeware, no shortcuts) you can make an audio-only AVCHD, playable on any Blu-ray player, and it will add a small-size black screen or if you wish, the titles of the audio you are using if you prefer to keep the TV on while listening.

I make discs with it and include no menu, just the black screen because I want them to be like a regular CD, just with higher-resolution audio. multiAVCHD can take DTS, Dolby Digital, Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD master audio, PCM stereo, PCM 5.1, MLP (DVD-A) and use as is or transcode to different forms.

I once made a DTS CD out of the isolated scores for both Jumanji and Bicentennial Man, long before getting into Blu-ray and HD audio.

Thank you for the precious tip Nick ! I'll try to do that one of these days...
I guess you can also convert DVD-Audio to readable discs on Blu-Ray players, while keeping the HD sound.

The additional freeware that multiAVCHD uses to convert audio from one format to another is called "eac3to".

Basically, in the audio and subtitle settings tab of multiAVCHD, you have a variety of options to convert any format to either PCM or ac3, and the only two reasons to do this would be either compatibility (if your home theater stuff isn't capable of playing a specific format) or disc space, since some formats use a lot more space than others when making the discs.

MLP (DVD-Audio) can be converted to ac3, DTS-HD can be converted to either ac3 (you set the bitrate to anything you want up to 640kbps) or PCM. PCM can be converted to ac3 as well.

If you are happy with the audio as is and don't want to change it, simply leave the "use eac3to" box unchecked.

The program's black screen that it adds is a 1080p resolution screen with a bit rate of around 20 kbps or so, giving it such a small file size that it doesn't take up room on the disc that would be needed for the music.

The chapter list is critical, so you can use it just like a CD tracklisting. It's like the music album is a movie that runs 1 hour, 15 minutes long and you have to divide it up by chapters, only those chapters are the length of the individual album tracks, and they have to add up.

So if you have three 5 minute tracks on an album, the chapter list has to be 00:05:00 for chapter 1, 00:10:00 for chapter 2, and 00:15:00 for chapter 3 and so on, and not the individual track lengths themselves like what you would see if you played a CD. It can be very tricky to do.