Audio Rip
The Objective
To create a collection of MP3 files from the audio tracks of existing VOB files. The VOB files had been previously extracted from the original DVD with the help of dvd::rip which, by the way, is a great and very well put-together tool for what it sets out to do. It is a tool meant to assist one in extracting and converting video and audio streams from DVD discs to a variety of other encoding formats. I could not, however, use it to accomplish the task at hand.
The Solution
After a brief initial consideration about using ffmpeg on the command line, I decided to go GUI with Avidemux. To extract the audio tracks, I simply opened the VOB files (I did it one by one, because there were just a few of them; still to be tried is the tool’s ability to define a job list) and chose Audio > Save. I had thought I could do the extraction and conversion to MP3 right there with Avidemux but, for some reason, the configuration dialog box for MP3 lacks a VBR setting. So I chose to encode the files manually, using the following command:
lame -h --vbr-new -V 2 <audio file>
I’m sure people can point out a handful of simpler ways I could have achieved the same results. In any case, what really matters is that the experience was nice and I’m more than satisfied with the outcome.