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Audio commentaries

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 (Edited)

Hey, gang, not sure if this is the right section of the forum to post this in, but I’ll roll the dice and let the mods move it. I’m starting to dig on putting movie audio commentaries on my iPod. In the past, I’ve done this with Total Recorder in real time. Though a pain, this has proven pretty effective. But this only works with DVDs because I use VLC media player; it’s harder to do with Blu-rays, and as far as I can tell, I can’t do it at all with my out-of-region Blus (I have a region-free Blu-ray player, but I’m not sure how to play them on a computer.). For the record, I have no intention whatsoever of putting these up online or anything of that nature; I simply like them for my own edification. Is there a quicker way to do this and to circumvent my problems with Blus, and especially alternate region discs? Figured this was a good place to ask 😉. I’ve been able to hunt down a few on YouTube too, but transferring those to MP3 and then to ACC within iTunes proves time-consuming as well.

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.”

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

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I’ve done this since college and tried a variety of ways. I do this just for my own enjoyment and because I usually don’t have time to rewatch the film with commentary. I still put commentaries on my digital audio player for listening on the go. To be honest I prefer listening to them without the film.

I like to extract the file (usually ac3) without converting in program and will then convert to flac for playback on my device.

For dvd the easiest thing is to get the dvd audio extractor program. It works like a charm and will let you directly extract an audio track or convert to different formats.

Blu-ray is much more convoluted. It took me ages to figure out but essentially due to the nature of the format you have to go about making a backup as if you were going to add a film to your own personal media server-then once you’ve done that you will be able to extract the audio commentary file itself before deleting said backup. It’s a bit time consuming and frustrating just to put the commentary on your portable player. You also have to deal with some tracks being hi-res which doesn’t work on most portable players so it will require down conversion in that instance. Useac3to is the most helpful bit of software in the world for extracting audio from various files.

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“George didn’t think there was any future in dead Han toys.”-Harrison Ford
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I’ve mostly just used Total Recorder to record them in real time, then converted the WAV files to ACC in iTunes. It’s a time-consuming pain, but it works. The problem is Blu-ray. It’s hard to even PLAY those on PC, let alone find a way to play them from other regions…

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.”

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

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On this subject, what’s the best program to convert a YouTube video to MP3 file? All of the free websites seem to take forever with longer videos.

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.”

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death