Okay....I want to get this posted for all of you who've downloaded the ISO's and now don't know what to do with them...Forum member CapableMetal has kindly sent me a tutorial to describe what he has done with these files for use. I'm going to post it here as a tied-you-over if you want to try somethings while we await the work borisanddoris and Eldonante are working on. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
You need the in_APTX.dll plugin for Winamp and Winamp 2.91 (the later versions don't recognise the plugin so cannot work). You then need to configure the output in Winamp from the DirectSound module to the Disk Writer. You then need to load the AUD file you're copying for the reel into the playlist, select mono track mode and just press play (important: only once!).
I had the Disk Writer output the WAV file to the desktop of my old laptop (its running XP, so I used it to ensure i didn't get compatibility errors, but as long as Winamp 2.91 works in later versions of Windows it should all work perfectly) and renamed the file so I knew which part it was (anh_r1_fR.wav, for ANH Reel 1 Front Right, for example) and kept doing it until I had ripped all channels of all reels separately. Then I opened up Sound Forge 10 (although any WAV editor that can handle 5.1 should work; I use Sound Forge and Adobe Audition as I have actually had training as a performance sound engineer for live theatre) and dragged each channel into place.
This is where I realised that the channels output by the AptX plugin were all wrong, I noted the correct mapping for ANH and am guessing for the rest of the trilogy, as they're mastered by the same studio.
This is how I label the channels for the sake of quicker reference: Front Left (fL), Front Right (fR), Center (C), Surround Left (sL), Surround Right (sR) fL = fL fR = sL C = C sL = sR sR = fR The values left of = are what the AptX plugin thinks they are and the right is where the channels actually belong.
When you create a 5.1 file in Sound Forge they are listed in the order of 1=fL, 2=fR, 3=C, 4=LFE, 5=sL, 6=sR, so you just mix them together putting the correct WAV to the correct channel. At this point I copied and pasted the sL and sR into a new 2.0 WAV and performed a low pass filter cutting all frequencies above 80Hz, and performed a channel conversion down to mono.
Then I copied and pasted the mono file to channel 4 (LFE) in the 5.1 file. Next, save all your files to a format that supports 5.1 (WAV's can be saved as 5.1 but can be awkward for compatibility; I saved mine as Sony w64 files but FLAC or any lossless format supported by Audition CS6 would suffice), and open them into an Audition CS6 5.1 mix.
At this point you need a Sync source video saved to a compatible format, like a MOV or uncompressed; Audition seems to hate x264's AVC video and won't open MKV files, so I saved my capture with the Lagarith Lossless RGB codec to AVI, which are BIG files, but if you shrink your video to something like 640x288 it will play nicely and be smaller. Using the 2.0 audio from my laser disc, I slid each reel into place and matched the peaks at the END of each reel, as close to the end that I could find matching waveforms and zoomed in to align them as closely as possible.
I then had to rate-stretch them to the right length so they matched up at the start. I did this for all reels, cropping the end and beginning "beeps" from each one and rendered them under stretch properties as Rendered (High Quality), Polyphonic to preserve pitch.
After many hours of it 'Rendering', you will be able to mixdown to a 5.1, I choose FLAC. I must point out at this point that converting these files to any DTS format would likely be overkill. DTS-HD MA has a large size and will be hundreds of megs larger than a FLAC file. FLAC will happily encode to 16-bit, 44KHz, as the DTS discs seem to be, encoding to normal DTS will slightly compress them again, and encoding to DTS-HD will offer no performance gains. It would probably need to be upsampled to 24-bit, 48KHz (at least), which cannot serve to make it sound better but probably only worse.
I read the Wiki page for theater DTS, and it mentions the 24-bit timecode, which has nothing to do with the actual audio bit-rate (same way video uses the SMPTE time code, which is 80-bits, whereas the video is likely around 10-bits). I'm fairly convinced, due to the age of the discs, that 16-bit 44KHz is their format and it would be best to keep it that way.
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PLZ, read this carefully as it explains something I read & posted about briefly in regards to the Winamp plugin not mapping the channels properly. CapableMetal will be on vacation for a bit so he probably won't be doing any further work until mid October. He has said the he's done versions of ANH & ROTJ from the ISO's he downloaded. Folks are waiting for me to get TESB up....it will be up soon. I will shoot for end of the week. Cheers!!!! :) :)
