DualDisc annoyances
I hadn’t read up much on the newish DualDisc format before I decided to buy one. That might have been a mistake.
I wanted to check out the new Fiona Apple album because I only read positive reviews. Shawn’s praise was the first I saw that gave me the idea.
The first thing I notice when I get the disc in the mail is that there is a sticker on the wrapper and a warning on the actual album art:
* The audio side of this disc does not conform to CD specifications and therefore will not play on some CD and DVD players.
That worried me a little bit, but I figured, how could they make a product that doesn’t work for most people. When I put it in my computer drive to go through my normal routine of ripping and encoding to FLAC I got an unexpected, yet foreshadowed, message from EAC that no audio CD was found in the drive.
While I didn’t want to completely buy into conspiracy theories, I tried to figure out my options. First, I flipped the disc over and ripped the DVD side hoping to extract the LPCM audio and break it into tracks and make my FLAC files from that. I fired up my old computer at the same time thinking maybe that drive would have more luck with the disc too.
It turns out that both of my alternate solutions worked out. Although it took a while fiddling with various methods and eventually some locating of new software to get the audio extracted from the DVD portion, I was successful on that front. Now I have higher resolution 48kHz FLAC files to listen to. My older drive was also able to read the audio portion of the disc and so I ripped it normally on the other computer resulting in 44.1kHz audio files.
I think it might almost be too much run-around to make it worth it to get my music how I want to listen to it when starting with the DualDisc format. I’ll definitely think twice before buying another one.
Technorati Tags: audio, DualDisc, FionaApple, exactaudiocopy, FLAC
