Ripping 7.1 to FLAC (or any file format): possible?

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The Bright Side

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Hello everybody!

Thanks to our member Ge Someone, I was able to properly set up my 7.1 sound system yesterday night. I'm already enjoying video games, but now comes the next challenge! Since I play all my music from my computer, I'm now trying to rip the 7.1 audio from the few 7.1 discs I have (Lichtmond, Ambra) to FLAC files.

When I open these discs in e.g. MakeMKV, it only shows me a bunch of 5.1 tracks to choose from though! I'm presuming that "higher" formats like 7.1 or 9.1 are actually in reality 5.1 streams with somehow encoded information for the additional channels. Now, when I ripped them to MKV or FLAC, I really only got 5.1 channels out of them. Even the audio tracks that are labelled "7.1" seem to only be in 5.1 when I play them in VLC - at least, I don't think I hear anything discrete in the side speakers, only the transitional front/rear blend that Ubuntu does when playing 5.1 sources in 7.1.

Since I don't have a real BluRay player, I can't listen to the 7.1 track to check how it "should" sound, but it looks very much to me like I really just have classic 5.1 files here.

Has anybody been successful at ripping 7.1 or higher to audio or MKV files and playing it back properly on PC? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

(bonus question: what happens when I play back an Auro 9.1 track on a 7.1 system? It's matrixed down to 7.1 channels, right? So the extra information from the height channels is mixed into the sides?)
 
Hello everybody!

Thanks to our member Ge Someone, I was able to properly set up my 7.1 sound system yesterday night. I'm already enjoying video games, but now comes the next challenge! Since I play all my music from my computer, I'm now trying to rip the 7.1 audio from the few 7.1 discs I have (Lichtmond, Ambra) to FLAC files.

When I open these discs in e.g. MakeMKV, it only shows me a bunch of 5.1 tracks to choose from though! I'm presuming that "higher" formats like 7.1 or 9.1 are actually in reality 5.1 streams with somehow encoded information for the additional channels. Now, when I ripped them to MKV or FLAC, I really only got 5.1 channels out of them. Even the audio tracks that are labelled "7.1" seem to only be in 5.1 when I play them in VLC - at least, I don't think I hear anything discrete in the side speakers, only the transitional front/rear blend that Ubuntu does when playing 5.1 sources in 7.1.

Since I don't have a real BluRay player, I can't listen to the 7.1 track to check how it "should" sound, but it looks very much to me like I really just have classic 5.1 files here.

Has anybody been successful at ripping 7.1 or higher to audio or MKV files and playing it back properly on PC? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

(bonus question: what happens when I play back an Auro 9.1 track on a 7.1 system? It's matrixed down to 7.1 channels, right? So the extra information from the height channels is mixed into the sides?)

Audiomuxer should be able to handle this (never tried it for 7.1 though). The only downside is that it doesn't handle decryption; you'll need to decrypt the blu-rays with something else first. I use DVDFab Blu-ray Copy to burn a decrypted disc first. There's also DVDFab Passkey that allows you to access the disc directly, without the need to make a copy. It comes in a 30 days unlimited trial version, and it worked hand-by-hand with Audiomuxer like a charm when I tried it. Another piece of software on my "to-buy" list...

Now, I have no experience with MakeMKV, but if it's able to demux (extract) the DTS-HD Master Audio track as-is, Audiomuxer should be able to make a 7.1 FLAC out of it.

Maybe I'm wrong, but Audiomuxer's knobs (and the manual) have me believe it can handle it.

7.1... really?!! (isn't envy a mortal sin?) :D


*as far as "unencoded" playback from a PC goes, HDMI can handle up to 8 channels (7.1 = 8), and when I use HDMI as output in Cubase, I see those 8 outputs available.
 
This may be a little obvious, but I'm known to do mistakes like that: Did you select the 7.1 audio output configuration in Windows?

Nevertheless.. I tried ripping the 7.1 DTS-HD Master Audio from the Dark City (Collector's Edition) blu-ray using Audiomuxer in tandem with DVDFab Passkey and it worked. Converted to 7.1 FLAC. Foobar2000 recognizes the 8 channels.

Here's a test file (FLAC) I made to check if the channels are sent to the proper speaker. 7.1 test


You can PM me if you'd like a sample from the rip I made.


(Yep, today was a lazy day.. :))
 
Thanks guys! I actually figured out my own solution. In my particular case, you need to add Linux to the equation, since that's where my daily life happens. I have Windows, but pretty much just for 5.1 in Netflix, and games.

It's a bit complicated to explain the procedure in Linux, but you can get it running - it involves Kodi and MakeMKV, and it's spectacular once you have it set up. I'm listening to Lichtmond 3 in 7.1 as I'm typing this. Heaven!

If you guys want the details, let me know. I will be happy to post them here when I have some more time (I kind of cut into my workday doing this, so now I'm playing catch-up).
 
Kodi with HDMI pass-through enabled with decoding done by your receiver should work ok too. Although that's not FLAC.
 
Kodi with HDMI pass-through enabled with decoding done by your receiver should work ok too. Although that's not FLAC.

Yeah I spent a lot of time toying around with that. Unfortunately, no matter what I did, whenever I had passthrough enabled, my receiver stayed completely silent.

I spent a few hours trying different sound servers (ALSA / Pulseaudio), and a whole lot of different configuration options inside Kodi, until I figured out through a/b testing that, in fact, all you need to do is activate 8-channel DTS decoding in the audio options, and all kinds of 7.1 will work (DTS, Dolby TrueHD, Dolby Atmos). It does Dolby out of the box, it seems.

The 7.1 DTS and Dolby trailers over on www.thedigitaltheater.com helped a lot! Plus, they're fun :)
 
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