Best Audio Decoding Settings OSX

[edpro]

Hi Friends, I'm a Makemkv novice. I'm on a Macpro 10.13.6 wanting to bring BDs into Avid Media Composer. I'm cutting trailers and sizzles hoping to get hired at a trailer house in LA. If possible I need to have discreet control over dialogue, music, and efx--especially dialogue. I may be using some Hong Kong, Chinese and Taiwanese films as well English ones. I use Brorsoft Video Convertor to convert the MKVs to .mov. When I link the .mov into the Avid, I see six channels of audio--which is good. But when I solo the individual tracks I'm not always able to find clean dialogue--sometimes there's music mixed, other times its clean dialogue.

My main question is in the settings. Do I use Default or AAC-Stereo? Perhaps FLAC or WDTV. I am using expert mode which is defaulting to AAC-Stereo I don't want Lossy if possible. I want the best possible audio.

I know this topic may dupe previous ones. Sorry, I couldn't find them.

[Woodstock]

Reducing the number of times audio is recoded is important; with the exception of loss-less formats like FLAC, each encode removes some detail. The further into your process that you avoid conversions, the better.

And there are reports that AAC and FLAC conversions are both taking a LONG time can play into your decision.

[edpro]

Wow, thanks for the quick reply Woodstock. Can we please clarify a few things in your response?

the number of times audio is recoded is important; with the exception of loss-less formats like FLAC

Just to be clear my issue is not really audio fidelity--its extracting the surround sound audio in a way that gives me the best chance of isolating dialogue from the music and efx tracks. Because I noticed in one film (from China), certain parts of the film have the dialogue on a separate track--which is exactly what I want. Other parts of the same film: dialogue and music are mixed together. Two different results from the same Blu-Ray.

FLAC is a lossless format? What does FLAC stand for? Should I be using that? AAC is already taking me nearly an hour for a 2 hour film--but I don't really mind that. I can set it up overnight. I'm not concerned about how long it takes to extract.

[Woodstock]

More information on Free Lossless Audio Codec: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLAC

Actually, conversion to AAC and FLAC should not take long, but, for some reason, people are reporting use of the AAC and FLAC profiles are making for LONG rips.

Ripping the audio from the optical disk "as is" is the fastest way to rip. You can then extract the audio tracks from the MKV files. I'll assume you have the tools to do that part.

As for "dialog audio in its own track", I haven't seen that very often, but I haven't honestly looked. I've seen articles on using the common elements between the channels of a track to find dialog, but that still picks up a lot of background/music, especially if the original recordings were mono or stereo, and later "expanded" to multi-channel. Are you using band-pass filtering to emphasize speech frequencies?

[edpro]

Wow, looks like I need to be using FLAC, just for safety. (And, in the event I use other audio processing later). No, I haven't resorted to eq or filtering yet, haven't gotten that far yet. As I mentioned: portions of the film are giving me exactly what I want in terms of separate dialogue--others not.

Actually, conversion to AAC and FLAC should not take long, but, for some reason, people are reporting use of the AAC and FLAC profiles are making for LONG rips.


Thanks for link! If I end up having to process audio later I'll want the audio to be lossless. So I'll use FLAC from now on and I'll report back if it increases my rip times compared to AAC.

When I rip to 7.1, and convert to QT with Brorsoft: any idea why it only gives me the 5.1 option? I've been told that 7.1 will not increase the likelihood of isolating the dialogue track but I would like to investigate that.

Thanks Friend! for the helpful response.

[Woodstock]

A word of caution to check whether QT supports FLAC yet. I know I've seen comments about FLAC being largely unsupported by Apple software. Not having a Mac for my own use, I can't comment either way.

For intermediate processing, have you considered using an uncompressed format? Things like PCM maybe large, but a lot of software supports it simply because it is what is used on CDs and some Blurays (just got one today with LPCM audio).

Of course, this isn't the place where audio experts hang out, just people like me that like to think we know a few things.

[edpro]

Many thanks!!!!

All of my tests have been performed on one Blu-ray disk only and I know they vary.

FLAC: Excellent call - thank you. Rip time seems actually faster - probably because its doing less math--but I don't have a number or % for you. Brorsoft supports FLAC. Size of file is unimportant to me--the bigger the better.

If I select 7.1 Lossless: In VLC: I can see that option in the Audio pulldown menu . But I've never been able to get VLC to output anything useful for Avid AMA linking or import--so no idea if that's what on there.

Brorsoft only gives me a 5.1 output regardless of what I feed it.

For the now the processing time of the three stages of my workflow: (MKV ripping, Brorsoft .mov conversion, and Avid AMA transcoding) seems like approx 2.5 hours per asset. Double that time for a Chinese film where I import both the clean and subtitled version. For now its fine. For doing 'ripomatics' that might become unworkable.

A cursory search for 'Avid', 'Media Composer', 'Adobe', and 'Premier' didn't turn up any relevant results. When I've got a few more in the can I can post my findings for other Avid or Premier users wanting to have a quick reference.

[edpro]

This should possibly be a new post - or even a Brorsoft question -- but I'm adding it on to the previous for context.

After more careful examination it appears I cannot create a .mov with forced subtitles in Brorsoft. When I hope my MKV file made in MakeMKV, I do see subtitles selectable in Leawo and VLC. So they're there.

Any suggestions? Brorsoft is great because it creates Avid DnX files. But ProRes is fine too. Anyone converting MKVs to QT for editing on Mac with forced subtitles?