1995hoo

Following up, I loaded the Cirlinca software and am looking at it now.

You can drag audio in pretty much any supported format into the right-hand pane of the window because the software will encode it all in the correct format for playing on a DVD-Audio. So you can use .MP3, .WAV, .FLAC, etc. (Apple Lossless requires a separate converter, however). If you're ripping a CD to put it onto a DVD, you ought to use a lossless format like .WAV or .FLAC because there is no benefit to a lossy-compressed format like .MP3 when the software is just going to re-encode it to something else anyway (you can always delete the ripped files afterwards if you need the space).

Before burning the disc, click the "Export" menu at the top of the screen and then click on "Write." Then look at the boxes that come up on the right side of your screen. The "Write" tab should be selected. Make sure to check the box that says "DVD-Audio" and make sure the other three boxes are unchecked. You can also have the software create the .ISO file for the DVD-Audio without burning it directly to disc if you like (useful if, say, you have a concert bootleg or a "mixed tape DVD" and you want to make multiple copies), although I just have it write directly to the DVD by selecting said radio button. On the "DVD Settings" tab I have it set to "optimize for gapless inter-track," although it's never made much difference.

That all does the job for me. The other thing I always do before clicking the "Write" button is that I disable my screen saver and exit my Web browser since those are the two most disk-intensive things I have running. I've found it seems like I get more bad burns if I have the system doing something else when I'm burning, so now I avoid activity as much as possible. I start it burning and then I go take a dump or get something to eat or whatever.

The big thing to remember with DVD-Audio is that you're not simply copying files to a high-capacity disk. It's not like 30 years ago where you put a floppy disk in each drive and typed "diskcopy a: b:" at the DOS prompt. You're re-encoding all the files into a different format (the potentially very big .ISO file) and then burning that re-encoded data onto the DVD. That's why simply loading up a DVD with .MP3s, or .WAVs, or whatever doesn't work.

BTW, I can't help you as to playing an .MP3 CD in the TL because I have a 2004 TL and it doesn't support that format. They introduced that in either 2006 or 2007. The 2004 will play a DTS-encoded CD, but I only have one or two of those and I hardly ever play one of them (Venus and Mars by Wings) because it was mastered from the quadraphonic master tape and the tracks are all in the wrong order compared to the original LP and I find it annoying.

1995hoo

I just re-read this thread and thought I should clarify the final sentence of the post above. I've never tried DVD+R because I remember back when I first took an issue in burning my own DVD-Audio discs (probably around 2008 in advance of a trip to Nova Scotia in the TL), several people said they'd had bad results using DVD+R discs but that DVD-R worked fine. So I've always bought DVD-R and have never bothered to try the other format.

The one thing I do spring for that costs a little extra is that I buy LightScribe DVD-Rs so I can burn a label to the other side listing what's in each group on the disc. When one DVD can hold several different albums by several different artists, that sort of thing is very helpful. (The DVD-Audio disc I was playing in the car this afternoon has a separate group for each artist: Bob Marley, Roger McGuinn, the Traveling Wilburys, Queen, REM, and John Cougar Mellencamp. Try keeping track of all that WITHOUT a label!)

revolutn

http://dvd-audio.sourceforge.net/