From the West End Desk

What is Hi-Res Audio?

Most audiophiles define hi-res digital audio as anything with a bit depth and sample rate greater than that used on CD audio. Depending on the artist, they may issue updated versions of their releases on DVD or Blu-ray Discs. Because the storage available on DVD (4.7GB) and Blu-ray Discs (50-100GB) are much higher than CDs, these releases can include high resolution audio files that require much more storage that is available on a CD (700MB).

Typically, you will find that the audio formats presented on these discs fall into several categories defined below.

Format	Bit Depth	Sample Rate	Hi-Res Audio?
CD Audio	16 bit	44.1 kHz	No
DVD Audio	24 bit	48 kHz	Yes
Blu-ray Audio	24 bit	48, 96, 192 kHz	Yes

What do I need to extract Hi-Res audio from my Blu-Rays and DVDs?

If you don’t already have the tool MakeMKV, this is the number one tool for extracting the audio tracks from DVDs and Blu-ray Discs. The operation is a pretty simple 2 step process. The process assumes you have a USB blu-ray drive attached to your Mac.

• Load a Blu-ray or DVD Disc into your drive and open MakeMKV

• Click on the drive icon and MakeMKV will decrypt the disc and show you a list of every title on the disc
• Find the title you want, in our case we’re just looking for the title with highest quality stereo track

• Deselect all of the other titles
• Set the output folder and click the MakeMKV button to save the title to your hard drive, this is the .mkv file you’ll be loading into the splitter
• Notice that the title you selected also has 10 chapters, which in the case of the album I Robot by The Alan Parsons Project, these chapters correspond to each track on that album

How to split this into .flac files
Using The Splitter

Once you have your .mkv file exported from MakeMKV, start The Splitter and drag-n-drop the file onto the source file well. These steps will allow you to look up the correct meta data and export your file in just a few simple steps.

• In the Metadata section, enter the artist and album title and click the search button. This will search Musicbrainz.org and Discogs.com for matches on this artist and title.
• The Splitter shows you a list of matches with details indicating when the number of tracks matches the number of chapters in your .mkv file.

• Select the search result that matches the album you exported
• The Chapters and Song Titles section will show you the song title matched to each chapter in your .mkv file

• The Cover Art image well is empty by default, but right clicking on the well gives you the option to download the artwork from Musicbrainz or Discogs, or you can select an image from your computer
  • Cover Art image sizes can be optimized based on the app’s settings.
  • If you’ve chosen to shrink any artwork files that are over a certain size limit, the app will compress or resize them to meet the needs of you streamer or portable device to ensure they can be displayed on the device or streaming app.
• Song titles are automatically matched to the chapters in your .mkv file
• In the left-most column there is a play icon, you can click this to preview the audio for each track to verify that the song title matches the audio for that chapters
• Song titles can be edited in the event that there is any mis-match from the downloaded metadata
• When you’re satisfied with the metadata, click the Encode to FLAC button to export individual .flac files for each chapter on the .mkv title
• When the encode is complete, you can add these files to your media library or add them to a portable media player

In the end you will have uncompressed, bit-perfect encodings of the original hi-res audio from your Blu-ray or DVD source that fit nicely into your personal media server or portable device.

What’s Changed

We’ve been working hard to make this application easier to use. The application now requires no additional software to be installed (aside from MakeMKV if you want to extract hi-res audio tracks from your Blu-ray Audio discs). All of the tools required to read CDs and encode your .flac files are now built in to the app.

Here is our current change log:

• ffmpeg 8.1.2 – bundled with the application, no need for external installation
• cdparanoia III, release 10.2 – bundled with the application, no need for external installation
• Settings Organization – settings options are now organized better by category
• Cover Art Selection – fixed an issue where it may be difficult to open the context menu on the artwork well, clicking anywhere within the well now shows the context menu properly
• Encoding Logs – Updated information in encoding logs to include versions of ffmpeg and cd-paranoia used during encoding
• Open Source Licenses – with the open source libraries now bundled, we offer a comprehensive guide to what’s installed and allow you to review all of the licensing that covers the installed packages

Visit The Splitter product page to download and update now.

We’re honestly just getting started. We are a very small team of developers passionate about music, collecting, and listening. The journey we’ve been on has led us to create what we feel are useful tools to help keep our collections organized and bring the physical media we love into play in a digital world.

The Splitter is out now

The Splitter started as a tool to solve a very specific problem. With all of the Blu-ray Audio discs we’ve been collecting, we wanted to enjoy the high resolution audio without having to start up the entire home theater system, navigate through the Blu-ray menu systems, and have the distractions of the visuals. Our focus was on a solid stereo listening experience.

The Splitter solves this problem by taking the hi-res audio tracks extracted as .mkv files and splits them out into individual .flac files with no loss in quality. It maintains bit depth, sample rate, and most of all uses flac encoding to ensure there’s no compression of the original audio stream.

With the files meticulously tagged with the proper meta data, they can then be added to your media server and streamed to a high quality network streamer. The app even manages the cover art size budget so you don’t go over the limits for your streaming hardware.

As our build out of the product matured, we decided to add CD ripping as well. We’ve built a 400+ album media library with all of our favorites that we’ve collected over the years and continue to add new titles as we acquire them. The same .flac encoding along side cd-paranoia’s verified extraction ensures bit-accurate rips of your CDs so disc transport hardware almost becomes obsolete.

Next up: The Archive

The Archive is a cataloguing solution for your entire records shelf. This one’s not fully cooked yet, but we’re working hard to get it done. At the start, it will be a mobile only app that will run on your iPhone. But having your entire collection in your pocket is our first goal. Once we’ve stabilized there, we plan to move onto iPads and possibly even a desktop app.

Our goal is to allow you to easily catalog all of your physical media, documenting individual releases of every album in your collection. It’ll store vinyl, CD, Blu-ray audio and even digital releases. Plus you can document your physical copies with photos, condition ratings, along with your own personal notes.

Stay tuned and as we have more information, you’ll see it first here.