[STEP BY STEP] Acapella Extraction from a DTS-CD (5.1)

For my second tutorial, I’m going to explain the audio extraction from a 5.1-mixed DTS-CD, it’s not the same process as for DVDs at all. IMPOTANT POINT: many DTS-CDs you can find "here or there" are often the result of a home-made spatialisation from a stereo mix (sometimes these are mentioned UPMIX). The only ones that are interesting come from a SaCD (there’s no "soft way" to extract 5.1 from a SaCD) or the audio track of a 5.1 DVD.

A DTS-CD presents himself like a vulgar audio-CD with tracks of various duration except that, if you put this CD into your discman you’ll only hear noise (the white one). You get quite the same kind of noise if you open any non-wave big file as a Wavefile into Audition or whatever you use.

In this tutorial, we’re going to use the following software: , , , , Notepad and Windows Explorer.

You can handle a real plastic disc called a CD (CDR), or a "CD image" (CUE+WAV, NRG, ISO… formats among many others) that you’ll be able to burn via your classic CD-burning software or mount it with a dedicated software (Alcohol 120%, Daemon Tools,… help yourself).

If you have a CD image into CUE+WAV format, you can skip the next image which represents a classical CDDA extraction software (here it’s DMC Audio CD Input, installed with dBpoweramp).

Though, if you use DMC Audio CD Input or another one (like Exact Audio Copy, CDex, or even Nero), you start choosing the right drive (virtual or real) where the DTS-CD is then you choose the songs you want to test. In this tutorial, we’ll take the example of Five Years by David Bowie, from the album Ziggy Stardust (a great rock classic by the way).
Normally, the album will be recognized by freeDB (database for CD albums informations) as the tracks lengths are the same as on the regular CD.

Nonetheless, I prefer to spend more time on , a software used by bootleggers (not the "mashup producers", the other kind) to cut the tracks of a concert they recorded the day before.

If you may, install CDWave, open it and click into the Menu "File > Load Cue Sheet…"

Fetch the CUE file you want to open.

Click OK on the following dialog box.

You’ll get something like this (a bit less joyful maybe, as I chose my own colors)

Notice that we can pick more than one track. I just picked one for this example.

To obtain the following dialog box, click Menu "File > Save", select "no conversion" on the right and the same directory (or not) where you have all the DTS-CD files . (One day, I’ll install Linux on this partition )

Click OK, you’ll get a directory that looks like this:

Notice that I renamed my file so there are no more spaces.

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Now the most complicated part, we’re going to use DTSdec via a batch-file (basically it’s a script that execute programs or functions).

First, you have to create a file called dtsdec.txt with the notepad and then rename it with the extension ".bat". It shall look like this. You can add more command lines by copying/pasting the line in the middle, I added an "_output" suffix so you can notice the output file is placed before the input DTS file we want to decode.
Note: If you "Click Right > Modify" on the .bat file, you can edit it into the notepad, as if it was a vulgar plain text file.

To make your life easier, here are the few examples lines you can copy to make your batch file (of course, replace "Five_Years_output.wav" and "Five_Years.wav" by the appropriate filenames):

[code:37kj4wzi]@echo off
echo DTS Decoder

dtsdec -o wav6 > Five_Years_output.wav Five_Years.wav

echo Conversion Finished
echo Press the SPACE BAR TO CLOSE THIS WINDOW
pause[/code:37kj4wzi]

While it’s decoding, you can see this:

And when it’s over, you get this:

Note: Pay attention to the characters you’re using into your file name, accents…

When you push the one key that doesn’t have a symbol printed on it (the Space Bar), your work directory should look like this:

You can open the obtained file into Audition or extract the 6 channels using like on the following picture — Clicking right > Convert to — (you may have to look for the necessary plugin in on the site).

If you open the output file into Audition, this one opens like 6 separate mono files:

Notice channel 3, it can contain the voice alone but sometimes more (and sometimes too much unluckily).

Save channel 3 as "Song (acapella).wav" for example and, depending on the source, if you don’t have any rhythm indication into channel 3, also save channel 1 or 2, like this:

Now you can apply the third part of my first tutorial and optimise the acapella.
Only then you’re able to use it into a mix or a mashup.
Notice that channels 5 & 6 can sometimes contain interesting stuff.

I just want to make a brief announcement and clear things about SaCD format.

I’d like to recall that DVD, DTS CD and SaCD are 3 totally different things, especially DTS and SaCD.
[size size=200:34dmnrii]SaCD CANNOT be decoded via any software,[/size:34dmnrii] you have to use an hardware device SaCD player and record the channels through the outputs. So don’t buy SaCD, you’d better try to find DTS CDs over the internet or buy DVD Audio instead. I can’t be held and I don’t feel responsible at all if you ever waste your money into SaCDs whereas you don’t have what ‘s needed to read them.