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Audio

Go to the Start menu and open (BeSweet icon) BeSweet.

At the Startup prompt, click the "BeSweet GUI" radio button.

Check the "Don't Ask Me Again" box.

Click the "GO" button.

Click the "Input" folder button.

Navigate to the ripping folder.

Select ".ac3", then double-click the .ac3 file you want to encode.

Click the "OK" button.

Select "DSPguru_Ogg_Vorbis_2ch" from the profiles menu.

Click the "Output" floppy disc button.

If you are encoding the main soundtrack, name the file "main.ogg".

If you are encoding a commentary track, name the file "commentary.ogg".

If you are encoding some other track, give it a similarly descriptive name.

Click the "OK" button.

Check the "Set Delay to" box.

Enter the Delay value found in the name of the .ac3 file exactly as it appears. It may be positive or negative.

(If the value is 0ms, remove the check mark.)

Click the "Azid 1" button and make the following changes:

Change Stereo mode to "dplii".

Check "Normalize to 100%".

Would you like to know more?Stereo
DPLII stands for Dolby Pro Logic II. This setting is used to optimally combine up to 5 surround sound channels from the DVD into 2 stereo channels in the Ogg file. The 6th (subwoofer) channel is taken care of in the LFE section of BeSweet. Ogg Vorbis has 5.1 channel capabilities, but right now it doesn't compress well enough to be useful. It doesn't matter too much if you use this setting for non-DPLII sources.

Normalize
This setting makes sure the volume is not too low.

Click the "AC3 / OGG / PCM" button.

If you are using 1 CD, select

Quality 0.300 for the main audio track,
or
Quality 0.001 for any commentary tracks.

Would you like to know more?Quality
A setting of q2 (0.200) is the default. The aoTuVb4 encoder version we are using is even better at low settings than the normal Ogg Vorbis encoder, so a setting of q3 will give very good results. If your source is lo-fi or mono, you can go down to q1, but you should probably give the main audio a thorough listening to if you go any lower, as it might not sound good.

Commentary tracks are mostly speech, and speech isn't that dynamic, so you should encode commentary tracks at the lowest setting. It's even possible to use negative numbers: with aoTuVb4 you can still get passable sound using a setting of -q1. (Just type "-0.100" into the Quality field, then uncheck the box and re-check it.)

If you are using 2 or more CDs, select

Quality 0.500 for the main audio track,
or
Quality 0.001 for any commentary tracks.

If you're encoding the audio for a series of episodes, follow the instructions in the brown section.

If you're encoding the audio for a feature-length movie, click the "AC3 to OGG" button and ignore the brown section.

Click the "Besweet" button.

Click the "Copy Command to Clipboard" button.

Create a new (.txt icon) text file in the ripping folder. Open it, and press Ctrl+V to paste in the command line.

Press Enter and then press Ctrl+V again. Edit this second line so that the path to the "input" file and the path for the "output" file both point to the ripping folder for the second episode.

Continue pasting and editing until there is a line for each episode.

If there are commentary tracks, create a series of lines for them as well. Only, be sure to change the "input" name to the correct .ac3 file name, and the "output" name to commentary.ogg or something similarly descriptive. Edit the quality value on commentary tracks to read 0.001. The delay value will most likely stay the same.

Save the text file and close it. Rename it to (.bat icon) audio.bat and double-click it.

Would you like to know more?Batch encoding
The batch file above will encode all the audio files automatically, one after the other. It would be much more time-consuming to encode one file, wait for it to finish, encode the next, and so on. If you have problems getting the batch file to work, however, you can do it manually.

BeSweet will make two passes for each audio file--the first to determine the max gain, and the second to encode the audio. It will take about 30 to 45 minutes per track, depending on the speed of your CPU and the length of the audio.

If you're encoding the audio for a feature-length movie, repeat the process for each additional track.

The example ripping folder now contains a "main.ogg" file and a "commentary.ogg" file. The third .ac3 file was not transcoded, and has been deleted.

Preview the .ogg file(s) in (VLC Media Player icon) VLC Media Player to make sure there are no glitches, and to make sure the file names correspond to their content.

Close BeSweet and proceed to the next stage.

PREVIOUS: Converting the Subtitles NEXT: Finding the AVS Script Parameters.
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