Catch-up (part 2: My Donnie Darko Soundtrack)

[Continued from yesterday.]

Now I’ve got the DVD-ROM in my Win2k box. I tried three different DVD “ripping” (”decoding”?) applications from doom9.net: DVD decrypter, SmartRipper, and vStrip. DVD Decrypter [sic] was easy to use and worked first time off. I got it to extract a VOB file. (I’ll come back to the others later.)

Now that I had this VOB file, presumably unencrypted, I needed to get the AC3 stream out of it. I tried using BeSweet and BeSweet GUI for this. I was able to get BeSweet to generate an AC3 file, but as near as I could tell it was decoding it to PCM/WAV, then re-encoding it to AC3! Who wants that? Not darky. After playing with it for a long time, it always seemed like it was doing unnecessary steps.

After playing with BeSweet long enough, it occurred to me that perhaps I should try opening the file with Sound Forge to test if it really did recognize it. Of course, it did not. Even if I ripped it to “AC3 WAV” (presumably AC3 audio in a WAV package) no dice. Lesson to the reader: Sound Forge 5.0 does (did?) not do AC3, at least not out of the box with no plug-ins.

So now I needed a WAV file, and BeSweet looked happy enough to make that. BeSweet sure does have a lot of options though. In the end I think I was able to make it generate a PCM WAV file at 48KHz, but not in 24-bit. (BTW, Andy wants you to do know that he doesn’t think AC3 on a DVD is 24-bit. I’m just unsure.) I was displeased with this. I also think it was trying to normalize the files, or resample them itself, and I don’t really trust anyone but me and Sound Forge to do things like this.

Then I remembered a utility I had downloaded earlier, HeadAC3he. A little poking around and I realized that HeadAC3he does a simple decode from AC3 to PCM WAV. It would do 24-bit, 48KHz (not resampled, as near as I can tell) and seemed to allow me to turn off normalization. It had significantly less options, which is probably good for a beginner like me. (Note that I think HeadAC3he is pretty much just a front end for Azid.) HeadAC3he, though, wouldn’t give me a straight AC3 stream.

So next I tried SmartRipper. It looked like it had pretty much the same features as DVD Decrypter, which means I couldn’t really figure out how to make it strip the AC3 from a VOB file and write it to a separate file.

So I tried vStrip, and it had more options, including ones that explicitly indicated they would write the AC3 to a separate file. It even offered to put “AC3 headers” on the file, though it wasn’t recommended. Tip for using vStrip: to select just one chapter, right click the chapter and hit the selection that’s something like “set beginning and end from this chapter”. vStrip actually seems to work based on some linear address within the DVD title, so clicking this sets the beginning and end addresses from the beginning and end of the chapter. Another tip: when it wants the IFO (or IDX? INF? Something like that) file for the title, and you’re doing title one from the DVD< beware of the file that's named something shorter than the rest, like VOB_01.IFO (instead of something like VOB_01_01.IFO); this file is for the whole DVD or something, and vStrip won’t be able to read it to get (presumably) the list of chapters and stuff. In the end, vStrip did give me an AC3 file that I was able to decode with HeadAC3he. However, playing the file it sounded sped up and screwed up, which I’m guessing was some sort of sampling rate problem. At any rate, I was exasperated with the situation at this point, so I threw out the more difficult to use vStrip.

Back to SmartRipper, I managed to find a tutorial somewhere on the Internet (sorry, link lost now) talking about how to do exactly what I wanted to do: rip the AC3 stream (correctly) from a file using SmartRipper. The trick is selecting the “Demux” option in the channel selection when you select the audio stream (i.e., 0x81 in my case for the two channel DD audio). If you select just the chapter you want, and just the audio stream, and the demux option, it magically takes the filename you’ve chosen to save to and appends some information to make it unique and indicate that it’s an AC3 stream; it tacks on a .AC3 extension too. I popped this file into HeadAC3he and voila! A correct-sounding WAV file. For the record, I found SmartRipper’s interface to be better in the end, if not exactly prettier, than DVD Decrypter’s interface.

So now I could make WAV files for each chapter I wanted. I will say that the files seemed to have a lot of background noise. I’m hoping that’s accurate from the DVD and not an artifact of the process I used to get the audio from the DVD. I tried running Sonic Foundry’s Noise Reduction plugin over the audio a couple times but it made the voices sound unacceptably modified. I need to play with it again, I think, because the noise on some of the tracks seems really noticeable, especially when you turn it up loud (like I have to on my shitty car stereo when my engine is being especially loud).

I used Sonic Foundry CD Architect to put the CD together and Sound Forge to edit the files. I did a bunch of fade in/fade out at the beginning/end of tracks, which was especially necessary with all the background noise in some cases. It was hard to get a clip of the characters speaking from the middle of the scene where there might not have been a lot of silence around the part I wanted, because then I had to fade in or fade out very quickly and it sounded kind of funny. I played with taking a bit of noisy silence and pasting it repeatedly at the end of a file, for example, but wherever the paste starts you hear a click; any suggestions for getting rid of this would be welcomed.

As far as normalization, the people at Hydrogen Audio would probably like you to know about MP3Gain. This utility will apparently normalize an MP3 in place; as in, it doesn’t require a decode to PCM, normalize, then a re-encode back to MP3. Pretty neat. Not useful for what I was doing, of course, but still pretty neat. MP3 gain, however, does talk about how you should normalize for “loudness” and not maximum peak value. This sounded like a good idea; I think (hope) this is the same feature as normalizing to “average RMS value” in Sound Forge. However, when I looked at the DD soundtrack tracks I ripped (using EAC BTW) they all seemed to be peaked right at 0dB. I took this to mean they normalized to 0dB peak value, like I thought most every CD usually is. Reconsidering this right now, I suppose they could have normalized the RMS value and just did some “dynamic compression” or whatever when it was going to result in clipping; I should probably try this, though honestly normalizing to maximum peak sounds fine in the result. My clips are still normalized to 0dB peak value.

I needed some songs (see track listing below) which were in DD but not on the soundtrack. I tried LimeWire (Gnutella network) first and found several of the tracks I was looking for. LimeWire and Gnutella are not specifically geared towards MP3, though, so there weren’t any options for searching for minimum bit rate and things like that. Plus, it seemed I was finding all 128Kbps tracks. Unacceptable. I then tried Kazaa and there wasn’t a lot of anything there either. Then I got WinMX. If you want to do music sharing, it seems WinMX is the client to use. In addition to having its own network, it will also connect to any number of OpenNAP networks (which are surprisingly – to me, at least — still in existence). Its interface seems a bit shoddy, but it works. I got a number of fast downloads, too. It’ll even let you do a search for “MP3/Ogg files of at least 192Kbps” (of course, I’m not quite sure what that does for an Ogg file). I found most every track I wanted there.

Without further adieu, here is the listing for my DD soundtrack as it stands now:

Some notes: I’ve used poor/inconsistent capitalization above; I apologize. If I include a formal track listing with the final version (which I think I would) I’ll make better efforts to correct it. “The Killing Moon” is by Echo and the Bunnymen, heard at the beginning of the movie while Donnie is riding his bike home. “Head Over Heels” by Tears For Fears is played during the tour through the school and introduction to all the characters at school in the beginning of the movie. (Was it his first day at school? I kind of think it was. October?) “Notorious” by Duran Duran is what Sparkle Motion dances to.

“Proud To Be Loud” is supposedly credited to “Dead Green Mummies” on the film, but is apparently by either Pantera or Keel. Pantera may have done a remake of Keel’s song, but the Pantera album “Proud To Be Loud” appeared on was in 1988 according to All Music Guide (Power Metal I believe; hey, are albums underlined? They are right now) so I figure this is likely the correct song/version/whatever. Also note that the few times I’ve found this track by “Keel” on WinMX, it has always sounded identical to the ones credited to Pantera. This song, BTW, is playing the first time we see the party in the Darko house, as Donnie is walking down the stairs and pulls the hood on his sweatshirt up over him. It’s quite faint, but I was able to pick out some vocals and this indeed sounds like the Pantera tracks I’ve been pulling down. I may stick a clip of Elizabeth saying OK to the party but “it has to be small” preceding this; it looked to me like the party was anything but small. I also don’t like Pantera, so believe me when I say I’ve considered not including this track at all.

“Love Will Tear Us Apart” is by Joy Division (IIRC) and is playing when Gretchen arrives at the party. “Under the Milky Way” is by The Church, played when Donnie and Gretchen are coming back downstairs after… er, spending some private time together upstairs. (Wink wink, nudge nudge.) I had to get Gretchen saying “some people are just born with tragedy in their blood” (something to that effect, at least), but it’s got “Love Will Tear Us Apart” audibly playing in the background. I’d love to sync this up with the actual song, perhaps, or get rid of it entirely, but I’m not sure either are particularly do-able. Right now, the end of that clip has an annoying drum beat that’s particularly loud for some reason, louder than the song during the rest of the clip. It’s really pissing me off. I with they had included a version of the audio without any music in it… but who the hell would want that, besides me?

As you’ve noticed, this has become somewhat of an obsession for me. Though the result is 37 (or 38) tracks, I assure you it still fits on a 74 minute CD. The songs from the score and my clips are real short. Oh, and before I forget, finding out which songs were in the movie was helped a great deal by the Donnie Darko FAQ, which may be unattended these days. Note that I do have INXS’ “Never Tear Us Apart” in a reasonable quality, but because it wasn’t used in the final version I opted for leaving it out. I doubt I could squeeze it in to a 74 minute CD anyway. At some point I will release at least some of these tracks, probably, and maybe the CD Architect file. Maybe I’ll even send the full album to people who ask nicely.

I’ll close this out now and move on to my laptop adventures for the next entry. Maybe I’ll go clean my bathtub and/or some kitty poop before I do that. Dinner with the parents tonight at 1830 at the Melting Pot.