New Wave Outpost Forum

We all love our MP3s, M4As and even the occasional WMAs or OGGs for storing our music in a convenient, compressed format, but what's on the horizon that supports 5.1 surround (and beyond)? Are there any file formats that are spearheading this or at least moving to support it? I'm admittedly out of the loop.

Also, we've all seen the trend towards DVD bonus discs with a lot of the new remasters, but now they are putting bonus audio tracks on DVD. Argh![:(!] This means that you will need a new generation of "DVD Ripping" software to extract the audio and convert it to MP3. Anyone have any recommendations for a good DVD audio ripper? For starters, I want to get those Depeche Mode b-sides off that damn dirty DVD![xx(]

Well here on the Mac side, there's Audio Hijack. I've used it to "rip" copies of Real Player files. It's great.

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/18611

As far as the 5.1 SS format goes, I'm sure Apple will either include an appplicable encoder in future versions of iTunes or come up with some new type of software.

<a href="http://www.worldwildlife.org/cetaceans/index.cfm">I dig whales.</a>

I use DVD2AVI to rip the audio to WAV from unprotected VOB files, Sound Forge to resample the WAV to 44.1, and finally, LAME/RazorLame to encode to MP3.

Actually, maybe DVD2AVI can resample to 44.1 while ripping the audio. Can't remember for sure, since I haven't done in awhile. DVD2AVI is freeware and small in size.

Have no idea about the 5.1 compression format.