Her er en glimrende beskrivelse af hvordan man kan udnytte pladsen på en DVD til gemme store mængder musik. En stor tak til Eric Izabelle for at have skrevet denne artikel og for at dele sine erfaringer med os andre.

Paris, February, 2003

DiscWelder STEEL: DVD-A FOR EVERYONE

Minnetonka Audio, 17113 Minnetonka Blvd. #300, Minnetonka, MN 55345; 952/449-6481; fax 952/449-0318; www.discwelder.com; www.surcode.com.

So you’d like to… burn some music on a DVD

With the growing availability of DVD burning hardware and DVD discs, the idea of burning music on a DVD is probably on anyone’s mind. There are obvious advantages in using DVD instead of CDs for audio applications:

• DVD has been designed to support and store higher definition material than the old CD, such as 20 and 24 bit and 44.1/48/96/178/192 kHz tracks, whereas CD is limited to PCM 16 bit/44.1 kHz files.
• DVDs can contain much larger files than CDs: 4.7 GB disc space (the equivalent of 4,300 Mb), a DVD can contain 420 minutes or more than 6 CDs of content (in the regular PCM definition, and 150 minutes in LPCM 24 bit / 96 kHz format).
• DVD discs are available at reasonable prices (about €10 for DVD/RW).
• Availability of reasonably priced PC-based DVD burners.
• Ability to read the discs on DVD players, and PC DVD drives.
• And, finally, DVD serves as the medium for multi-vendor standards, which guarantees a level of standardization for the future.

This is particularly tempting for “home studio” users and musicians, who can burn their works in much higher quality format, but also for music lovers who want to store their analog material (vinyl, tapes, etc) in a format that does justice to the original material.

When you want to burn a DVD, you need to go in two steps: preparing the file structure ("authoring"), and actually burning the files on the DVD disc.
You will find many software packages than can help you author and burn a DVD with video content (DVD-V), and some packages actually come free bundled with the DVD burner.

I would simply give one piece of advice to people who engage in authoring DVD-V for audio: prepare for some long, long, hours in front of your PC. It is nowhere near as simple as it sounds, and unless you have some help and guidance in doing it, you are in for a lot frustration.
Actually, my advice would be: "Don't". Unless you have very specific reasons for authoring music in DVD-V format, forget it.
If you have access to a DVD-Audio compatible player, go for DVD-Audio.

I had heard of discWelder Steel through the Hi-Rez Highway forum of the Audio Asylum site. When I realized I wasn't getting anywhere anytime soon writing music on a DVD-V (this was after a few weeks of painful attempts, and several week-ends lost sitting in front of my PC), I decided to try the DVD-Audio option. The full discWelder Chrome package was too expensive for me, so I purchased the Steel product… and I'm glad I did.

DVD-A made simple

Since I had been through a number of DVD authoring packages before checking out this product, the ease of use and minimalist approach of discWelder Steel came as a huge relief. I had gone through various packages such as Sonic MyDVD, VOB Instant CD/DVD, and of course Nero. Well, compared with these products, discWelder Steel has less features, but it is far more simple, reliable and stable than any of those packages.

In one month of regular use, I have encountered only two or three minor glitches, where the software refused to burn, but the defaults could be fixed easily and I could burn about 50 DVD-RW discs without a single deffective disc or a single glitch.

When I thought about a short review, I started to write an outline, and wanted to provide a detailed walkthrough. After a few minutes, it became obvious to me that there is nothing to review, because the product is so simple and straight-forward. The discWelder Steel package is as simple as PC software gets, it is the most intuitive 'one-in-a-box' DVD package I have ever seen. It is almost idiot-proof, there is nothing you can do wrong, and the software works like a Macintosh software.

In fact, the downloadable demo (http://www.discwelder.com/pdfs/discWelderSTEELDemo.exe) will give you a perfect idea of all the functionalities available, except for the actual file writing and burning functions. The full version, which comes in a simple DVD case package, is the same product, with additional file writing and burning functions.

If you download the demo version, you will see that the whole package works with the 10 icons on the taskbar. New, Open, Save, About, Record, Media Properties, Select (recorder), Image (for creating a disc image), Open (tray) and Close (tray). A few additional features can be accessed from the menu, such as a Disc Erase function, or the ability to set the temp directory for the large files you plan to write, and access to the basic menu editing functions. But basically, this is it, all you need is to use those 10 keys.

The user manual is very simple (http://www.discwelder.com/pdfs/300steelBook.pdf ), and provides all the necessary information.

Pict 1 - The user interface is as simple as it gets: 10 icons, your files, and your DVD-A structure in the bottom panel of the window.

Using the software proves very intuitive. The software has a very simple user interface, with directory structure and files on the upper two windows, and your disc structure on the lower part. All you have to do is select your files on your computer, and place them in your DVD structure. You can proceed to some basic editing (type in the name of your tracks, album title, and change the font size of your menu), and then… burn your DVD-A. It is really as easy as 1, 2, 3.

Pict 2 - The Album Properties menu lets you adjust font size and create a title for the album, so this is what you will have on your TV screen. But the menu options are very basic, and you will have to upgrade to the Chrome version for full control of the font, slides, and background pictures.

Pict 3 - This little pop-up is your key to writing your own DVD-A discs. You have to bear with two different steps (preparing and writing the disc), and about 15mn to finalize the disc, and you're done.

What can you do with it, exactly?

Using discWelder Steel, you can:

• Create entire DVDs of music in 44.1, 96, or even higher resolutions if you have the appropriate material (I don't, so I can't comment on the performance). Most of the material I tried to burn was simple CD files, which I could burn up with up to 99 tracks, or about 450 minutes of music (or 7 1/2 hours of music). This is the modern equivalent of "very long play" reel tapes, that some of us enjoyed a few years back, with all the advantages of an on-screen menu, and instant access to your favorite tracks. For example, I could rip and burn my whole Bill Evans "Turn Out the Stars" Final Village Vanguard session box set of 6 CDs on one single disc in just about 2.5 hours, and now I can play it and choose my tracks from a menu, or in random order for 6.27'.33" hours. On a slightly different register, I could stack all my Depeche Mode singles and EPs (about 30 of them) on a single disc. For some people contemplating the use of a CD jukebox, writing DVD-A discs may be an alternative. These "very long play" discs will play on all current market DVD-A compatible players, although there is a slight compatibility issue with Pioneer based models (see below).
• For all your discs, the software allows you to customize your main menu, and adjust the font size as well as the type face. The visual options are limited, and so is the background picture (you have no choice here but the built-in template, which is not so pretty), because the more advanced graphic features are only available on the Chrome package.
• PCM 24 bit /96 kHz works, but obviously takes more space on your discs. If you have some home studio material, or high quality recording that you can format in 24/96, there are huge advantages to this, as you will be able to listen to your recordings in a much higher definition than before. An obvious application of this is the ability to record analog sources (vinyl) through a 24/96 soundcard, and burn it on a DVD-A. This also allows you to burn the 24/96 LPCM tracks of some DVD-As and DADs, if you know how to it and if you have the patience. Few discs have the LPCM tracks accessible, so don't plan on anything major in that direction. The higher resolutions only work in stereo, because multichannel tracks require MLP encoding, which is not included in the package.

OK, but can you do 'FUN' stuff?

Yes, definitely, this software is definitely fun. Once you have mastered the interface and burned a couple discs, you can engage in some seriously fun experiments.

• If you want to experiment multichannel, you can create your tracks with the 5 main discrete channels, plus the LFE, but only in 44.1 kHz (48kHz may work, I haven't tried). If you do that, you will need mono tracks, of the same size. I have done some basic experiments, but only for fun, since I have no use as a musician. This can lead you to some fun stuff, though:
• You can create your own surround mixes, using appropriate software, as long as the surround filess you generate are saved in a compatible format. This has nothing to do with the DD 5.1 compatible software you can find on some sound cards and audio software, which allow you to set some reverb and delay into the rear speakers. You can take full advantage of the 6 discrete channels. I tried to use this with a mono recording, and it gives a very nice impression of being "inside" the recording, very much like using headphones. This may not be a "purist" approach to historical mono records, but it's a hell of a lot of fun.
• I don't think that feature will be very useful for most people, but I'll mention it just for fun: You could author and burn so that you have several records playing simultaneously in discrete channels, in any combination of L/R and SL/SR.
• Another (perhaps useless, but fun) feature: you can use your rear speakers as main speakers. You can burn a track with the two front channels located in your rear speakers, simply by using blank files for the 2 front channels, and placing your left and right channels into the right surround and left surround, respectively. If you have full range surround speakers and decide to sit facing back your TV screen, this may be a nice way to change your perspective on your living room… ?

Sonic performance

Well, how does it sound? I cannot comment on the 24/96 material at this stage, as I do not have sufficient material to make any judgment. But I have created many PCM 44.1 discs, and I can say that the result is perfect, although the result depends on the original material, and on the PCM output of your player. Perhaps some users with a better system than mine (or better ears ?) will find some subtle differences between the source PCM material and the copy burnt on a DVD-A disc. So if your DVD player's CD playback is good, and that your source material is good, the result will be just as good.

Do you need a super-fast PC?

In case you don't have a super-fast PC, you need to know that discWelder can run on even on a modest PIII 500mHz, running on W98 (that's my config). It does not require a special soundcard, nor a lot of disc space (however, DVD files need a minimum of 5 GB, so you need at least 10 GB of disc space). All it requires is a decent PC and a DVD burner, such as the Pioneer models. And, even on a relatively simple and old PC like mine, discWelder writes and burns DVD-Audio discs extremely fast.

Depending on the actual amount of music you want to store on your DVD-Audio disc, it may take as little as 20 min, up to about 2 hours for a full 4.7 GB disc. Since I had seen so may problems with DVD-V authoring (buffer underrun, PC freezing in the middle of burning a disc, etc), I was a bit paranoid at first, and I kept pumping up some free RAM using RamBooster. After a few discs, I decided to leave it alone and go on other business while the software prepares, writes, and burns the files, and it performs flawlessly even when the CPU use is high and RAM is low. So, in my experience, just launch the burning and enjoy a movie, it works.

Do you need specific DVD types?

There are several types of DVD discs on the market, and of course, they are not compatible: DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, and DVD+RW. Minnetonka Software is clearly supporting the Pioneer burner models (A 103 to A105), but the product works on all types of discs, and all burners. The software uses a burning plug-in licensed from Gear Software, so you can check on your specific model using their web site utility (http://www.gearsoftware.com/Support/tables/platforms.cfm )

Some limitations

There are a few limitations in the discWelder Steel package, especially in terms of user-friendliness:

• The menu customization is very basic, and will not let you see the very long titles of your tracks. The default picture of the menu is OK, but not really great (my daughter said it looks like someone puked on my TV screen, - nice kid).
• You cannot display track information / title / credits on a slide for each track when playing (just like on DVD-A discs). This feature is only available in Chrome. So when you are playing your DVD-A, you have no option to know the title of the track unless you have printed a label…
• …speaking of which, there is no label / case sleeve design function, so if you want to create one, you must use some other software package. This will prove the worst shortcoming of the product for many users.
• There is a short blank between each track when you play your discs. This is annoying when the tracks have been created to flow into the next (e.g. Pink Floyd's The Wall, which consists of four continuous tracks). I enquired about this with Minnetonka Software, and they replied that they have a unique "gapless" technology which allows having no silence between the tracks, but it is only made available in the Chrome package. You can still go around it, by copying and pasting your very long tracks into one huge file, and bur it (I could re-create The Wall into 4 tracks, and burn them without a problem, only I cannot access an individual track on this version).
• Track titles are not automatically recognized by the software from your file name. So if you have 99 titles on your disc, you will need to type the titles one by one.
• You cannot "drag and drop" an entire album into your disc structure, but have to double-click on each track.
• You cannot move a track up and down in the disc directory, so if you decide to move a title, you have to delete it, and insert it again at the right place. Since you have to re-type the title, this is even more painful.
• No interface with CDDB.

In short, PC users will not find some common features that have become standard on most consumer music packages such as Real JukeBox or MusicMatch Jukebox, perhaps because this is the entry-level version of a professional software. Some key features have been left out in this version, so as to encourage customers to upgrade to the full discWelder Chrome package, and this only fair marketing, since the Steel version is only 20% of the Chrome .

Any bugs?

In more than one month, I have seen only one bug in the software, which is very minor: Once in a while, if you erase a disc before re-writing it, the software will not recognize the medium as blank, or will lose track of the recorder so it will stop before burning the disc and will display an error message. So every time you erase a disc, you have to open and close the tray, let the software identify the blank disc, and do your burning.

Excellent support

I usually don't compliment companies on their support, because I feel it's only part of doing business. But having dealt with a number of software vendor hotlines and with so-called user support websites in my life, I have to say the Minnetonka Software support is excellent. The package was shipped and delivered very fast, and the people at Minnetonka did everything possible to make my life easy. Even though I had questions before and after purchasing the product, they spent time and efforts replying, and helping whenever necessary. I don't expect this will still be true when it becomes a huge multinational company, but for now Minnetonka have a very customer-oriented service attitude, which is not so common these days.

Player compatibility

I use the discs created with discWelder Steel on a Marantz DV-8300 universal player, and I have to report that there is a compatibility issue. If you burn more than 30-odd tracks, the Marantz will "hang" and will not start to play. I reported this to Minnetonka, and after some tests in their labs, they aknowledge the problem with their Pioneer Elite DVD player (which is the same base as the Marantz). I checked with other Pioneer players at a store, and had the same problem. Other brands such as Toshiba, Panasonic, or Technics, do not have this problem. I have not tested it with Denon players, so I cannot be positive about it, but Minnetonka stated that Pioneer Elite is the only model that has this problem. So I ended up buying a small Toshiba player to play the longest discs, and it works fine now (except that CD playback is not as nice as the Marantz, so I'll have to work on that).

Conclusion

This software is probably the best option for anyone who wants to burn music on a DVD, either as a musician, audio hobbyist, or as a music lover. It is the most simple, reliable and stable software you will find, and will make you wonder why DVD authoring software cannot be this simple. The price may seem a bit steep at first, but it will save hundreds of hours in authoring DVD-V packages, so it is well worth it if you plan to burn more than 10 discs. For the most advanced users, upgrading to Chrome will be a natural option after a certain point, and if you can part with the extra cash, it's probably the best option, because you will have access to additional features such as menu editing, and of course Minnetonka's "gapless" technology. If your budget is tight, the Steel product will provide all the basic features you need to create your DVD-A's, leaving you time to sit back and enjoy your music.