Because I am a giving person, I present to you--my fellow what.cd?-ers, the most convenient way to rip DVDAs yet. Just rename, make a playlist, and replaygain. In the spiret of the program, I shall attempt to make this guide equally short; in that vein, let us begin!

The program you will use is DVD Audio Extractor. You can get it from www.castudio.org/dvdaudioextractor. Though it is not free, (it's shareware) there are various methods that can be employed to make this no longer an issue; you can, of course, buy it, but seriously, serials are everywhere, and any from any version will work forever. Or you can be 1337 and hack it, or if you're lazy, just uninstall it after 30 days, delete all the reg keys related to the program, and reinstall. Choose whichever one you see fit, but note that if you do end up getting a torrent, you must install version 5 or above as that's when DVDA support was added. You can use a key from any version however.

This program works on Windows NT, 2K, XP, Vista, and 7, 32 or 64-bit. (I have no idea about the server OSes but you're just freaking weird if you're trying this on one of those... don't see why it wouldn't work though) (it's a 32-bit ap but those of course work on 64-bit Windows just fine) (This is a useless parenthetical aside)

After you get past the reg-nag screen in your preferred fashion, a dialog box should pop up listing titles for the DVD you have inserted. If not, choose your DVD drive in the DVD source combo box (this will also list your drive firmware and model number which is useful info to have). The titles on your DVDA will appear in the tree view with the first title automatically selected. This is by no means the correct one, however. Conventional wisdom is that the one with the longest time is likely the main album, so select that. 

As of now at least, the titles from the DVD-video portion will appear, but be inaccessible. There is a way around this which I'll get to in a moment but think of the DVDA portion and the DVD portion as two separate discs and when dealing with one, pretend that the other doesn't exist. Just preview everything before you try and rip it and if it gives you an error message, it's probably because you're trying to play from the video part of the disc. Also there can occasionally be odities such as duplicate copies of the same title, or ones that appear to be but then don't play; this is usually because of some weird copy protection the studios are trying. Just, again, preview each title you've selected to make sure that audio plays and if it gives you an error, try a different one.

Next, select the stream you wish to rip from the combo box for each title you've decided to rip. You can rip multiple titles at once, however only one stream from each title at a time. But you can mix and match; for instance, you can select 2496 MLP 5.1 from one title, and LPCM 1648 2.0 from another; both will rip in one go without issue.

Next there is a list of chapters; feel free to select or deselect at will. I usually leave them all checked but often times there will be one chapter at the end that's only a few seconds long and contains silence which you'll end up deleting afterwards.

Once you have chosen exactly what you wish to rip from teh disc, and checked to make sure that it's all going to rip right (if it plays in teh preview it will rip), select next.

Now you must decide what atributes your ripped copy will have. PCM rips aren't allowed here, however if you wish to copy out all channels esearately for your own nefarious purposes select uncompressed wave and the "save each channel into a separate file" checkbox. As far as I can tell the FLAC option is gapless, so I don't see a point in the image and qsheet option. However, if you think that it's better and don't mind retracking it yourself, go crazy; you can tell it to compress the image to FLAC if you like. For ripping DTS and AC3, I like to leave it on direct stream demux to save space. However for DVDA this is absolutely not what you want to do, as basically nothing can play MLPs and FLAC is a more efficient lossless decoder in any case so there's no advantage to keeping it that way. 

No matter what format you're using, make sure that you set the samplerate to "same as input." If you do not, your upload will be a lossie transcode be deleted, and you will receive a warning. Not good! Similarly, you'll want to select "stero" if you're ripping a stereo layer or "all six channels" if ripping surround, as well as "24" for the bitdepth if you're ripping a 24-bit layer (which is almost certainly the case) or 16 if you're ripping 16-bit MLPs.

If you're ripping to FLAC, you're done; hit next and skip this paragraph. If however, you wish to rip directly to OGG or MP3, you will next need to select your quality settings. Don't bother with the MP3 presets, or if you do, only use insane or extreme as anything less will be deleted for being under 192Kbps. Instead, choose custom, select VBR if it isn't already, and set the slider to 77% (-V2) or higher. Do not bother with ABR. If you want a 320Kbps rip, use the insane preset, or disable both VBR and ABR and select the 320Kbps constant bitrate from the box that appears. I think fast is the encoding quality you want, also, but I could be wrong. The program comes with an updated copy of LAME so don't worry about that. Note that you can't rip surround sound to MP3; if you try it will be muxed to stereo. You can, however, rip surround sound to OGG; not to get too long-winded, but you'll need to make sure that the quality settings you use with OGG are sufficient for the rules of this tracker.

We're almost done! Click next, and it will ask you where to save the output files. It will also make an M3u playlist for you, but I would not recommend using it, as when you rename the files later you'll end up editing the playlist anyway so it's less time consuming to have another program do it for you afterwords. Also, do not! normalize, as this changes the audio and will make it no longer a lossless rip. If you wish to level out your volume levels, consider a player that supports replaygain or soundcheck. Tagging the files can save some time, however you'll need to edit the tags to remove the incorrect titles later so it's questionable how much time that actually saves you.

Click next, and we're ready to go! Just select the priority of the program (I always tell it to go to full as it never actually slows down my system any and I've run this program on a socket-754 CPU with 384 megs of RAM), select what you want it to do after it finishes encoding, hit start, and go get yourself a coffee while it works. The process can take quite a while depending on your drive, however when you consider the amount of effort it takes in the normal way--copy the MLPs, decrypt them with WinDVD (but the right version of winDVD), extract each song into individual .wav files for each channel in the sircode program, recombine the channels into one file per song in wavewizard, then encode to FLAC--making sure you've set the correct settings in every program to ensure no quality loss--you're really saving yourself a lot of headaches and frustration by doing it this way. 

Once it's completed, rename the files to correspond with the tracknumbers and titles of the album you've ripped, tag appropriately, replaygain if desired, (please, for my sake, please do this, I -hate- having to RG stuff I've downloaded from here as then I'm not listed as seeding that torrent and it makes my required ratio go up or, worse, keeps downloading that piece making me have to do it again) add an M3U if you want. You're done! Congratulations.

Usually the video session of the disc will contain bonus making-of content, interviews, or b-sides. Also many discs put the surround sound as the only audio stream for the DVDA portion of the disc and leave the stereo as uncompressed 2448 LPCM in the video title. To access these files for ripping, you'll need to tell the program that you're not interested in the DVDA part of the disc and point it at the video part instead. To do that, restart the program, and in the DVD source, select "folder - open DVD files from file folder". Click brouse, navigate to your DVD drive, and select teh video_TS folder. At this point, the rest of the window should populate with the video titles; if it does not, try hitting refresh.

From there, everything is the same as it was for ripping the audio portion, so I refer you to the rest of what I've already written for instructions if you need them.

If there's any questions, feel free to post them in this topic or PM them to me so that I can make this tutorial more imformative, easier to understand and, hope springs eternal, shorter and more concise. I hope everyone appreciates this information and wish you all happy listening!