[SamR]

How do I copy music, I have recorded, from a DVD to a CD?

[StaticFX]

What kind of files are they? Or is it directly recorded to the dvd... like all one file? Need more info... what is recorded to the dvd, and how was it done? Files? Sound? Etc :)

[SamR]

I recorded the music from albums. The files created on the DVD were VIDEO_TS.BUP, IFO and .VOB files. Can these be converted to a cd format so I can play them in my car?

[DanielF]

Sam, that's a really weird way to record albums to a DVD! :)

Are we talking about vinyl albums or CDs? If CDs, of course you don't need to recover the audio from the video files - just copy or rip/burn the original CDs. And for vinyl albums, you can convert them via your sound card to WAV files, then burn a CD.

But if for some reason you no longer have the original albums, and the DVD is your ONLY copy, here's one way you can recover the audio (there are other ways - search for "extract audio from DVD", or some similar phrase, and you'll find many discussions about methods for doing this).

My method (found from one such discussion group) uses EAC3TO.EXE, a free download. I'd recommend you also download EAC3TOGUI.EXE, to simplify using EAC3TO, in case you're not comfortable working in DOS.

After starting EAC3TOGUI, select your source file (one of the VOB files on your DVD) in the 'Source File' box, then specify the desired destination path/filename in the 'Destination File' box. Make sure you include the .WAV filetype for your destination filename, so EAC3TO knows you're creating WAV files.

Now you need to set a few options to tell EAC3TO how you want the audio to be converted. In the 'Conversion Options 1' tab, in the 'PCM and TrueHD Options' box tick the '16 bit' selection. Below that, in the 'DownMix Options' box, tick the 'Downconvert to 16 bit' selection. Now go to the 'Conversion Options 2' tab and in the resample options box select 'Rate (Hz)' 44100 and 'Qual 4' (this is the highest quality). You don't need to do anything in the other tabs.

By now you should have a 'Command Line Preview' that looks something like this:

eac3to.exe "H:\VIDEO_TS\VTS_01_1.VOB"  "F:\Videos\Temp\xxx.wav"   -down16 -16 -resampleTo44100 -quality=4

(of course with your own source and destination paths).

If you now click the 'Convert' button, EAC3TO will open in a DOS box and do the extraction/conversion for you, producing a WAV file. If you created a separate VOB file for each album track, all you need to do (after extracting each to a separate WAV file, as described above) is burn all the WAV files to a CD using your favourite CD burning program.

But if you recorded the entire album to one (or a few) VOB files, you'll possibly want to split the resulting (long) WAV file into the original individual tracks, using your favourite audio editing program, before burning to a CD.

Give me a yell if any of this is unclear.

Daniel