How to Create a DVD-Audio Disc

These are the steps to create a DVD-Audio disk. DVD-Audio disks can be played only on DVD-Audio players. Many universal players can also play DVD-Audio disks. Currently no new DVD-Audio disks are being released. However high resolution music (sampled at 88.2 KHz or 96 KHz 24-bit) is available from http://www.hdtracks.com, and if you have a DVD-Audio player you can burn the files to a DVD-A disk and play them on your player. This sounds great! You can play them directly from your computer to your stereo, but you need to make sure all components properly pass through the digital stream. My current hardware does not, so this is the simplest solution for me!


Downloads:
1. Download DVD Author (not the core version) from:
http://dvd-audio.sourceforge.net/howto.shtml
2. Download CDTools, cygwin1.dll, and DLLs needed by mkisofs from:
http://www.student.tugraz.at/thomas.plank/index_en.html
3. Virtual Clone Drive (to mount the iso for testing)
4. Download foobar (to test the DVD-Audio disk that you created)
5. Download the foobar DVD Audio plugin from http://sourceforge.net/projects/dvdadecoder/
6. Download FLAC (to convert flacs to wavs)
7. Download wmal2pcm_setup.exe from Microsoft (to convert Windows lossless files to wav


Preparation:
1. Use only WAVs.
To convert FLACs start FLAC Frontend in Admin mode.
To convert WMAs:
"C:\Program Files\Windows Media Components\Tools\WMAL2PCM\wmal2pcm.exe" "input_dir" "output_dir"


Installation Steps:
1. Install Virtual Clone Drive, Flac, WMAL2PCM, and Foobar
2. Place the DLL from foo_input_dvda-0.4.1.zip in the foobar components folder.
3. Install DVDA Author. dvda-author-09.05-11.win32.installer.exe will create DVD Author directory:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\dvda-author-09.05"
4. Unzip the following into the same directory:
-- mkisofs.exe from cdrtools-3.00-win32-bin.zip
-- DLL from cygwin1.dll_1.7.6_.zip
-- All DLLs from dlls.zip


Creation of a dvd-a disk:
1. Create a DVD-a Processing Directory
2. Create two files: dvda-author.conf and sort.txt in the DVD-a Processing Directory


Paste the following lines into a text file and save it as sort.txt:

DVD/AUDIO_TS/AUDIO_PP.IFO 8003

DVD/AUDIO_TS/AUDIO_TS.IFO 8002

DVD/AUDIO_TS/AUDIO_TS.BUP 8001

DVD/AUDIO_TS/ATS_01_0.IFO 8000

DVD/AUDIO_TS/ATS_01_1.AOB 0

DVD/AUDIO_TS/ATS_01_0.BUP -8000

Paste the following lines into a text file and save it as dvda-author.conf

## dvda-author configuration file

## These parameters override hard-code defaults.

## Comment out parameters with # to unselect them.

## lexer will skip lines beginning with # or without any content or with just white space or tabs.

## Extra white space or tabs will be skipped.

## debugging verbosity level

# debug

3. Place wavs in the DVD-a processing directory
4. Open Command Window as Admin


cd ""

"C:\Program Files (x86)\dvda-author-09.05\dvda-author.exe" -o DVD -g *.wav


"C:\Program Files (x86)\dvda-author-09.05\mkisofs.exe" -o discname.iso -sort sort.txt -udf DVD


5. Mount the iso file and test playback through foobar
6. Burn the iso to dvd