GAMOV-SPHERE

If you want to compile multiple audio CDs to one disk that you can play on a regular DVD player, you can create a DVD-Audio (DVD-A). It’s especially useful to group CDs that have a short play time (around 30 mins). One DVD-A can hold about 550 mins at CD quality (44.1khz).

To make them on the Mac, download the free application Burn here:

http://burn-osx.sourceforge.net/Pages/English/home.html

Choose the Audio tab, then select DVD-Audio; Drag files over from iTunes or the Finder; reorder if you wish and burn the disk.

To conserve the CD audio quality, make sure your source audio files are not lossy compressed by using AIFF/FLAC/ALAC/WAV formats instead of MP3/M4A/etc… Many tools help you to rip your CDs at full quality (iTunes, Max, … or XLD, my favorite: http://tmkk.pv.land.to/xld/index_e.html).

If you want to install CLI tools on MacOS X, I recommend Homebrew:

http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/

You will have to remove Fink/MacPort first if you installed them previously. Don’t forget to add /usr/local/bin to your PATH.

Using MakeMKV (available for Mac and Windows) you can easily extract tracks from encrypted Blurays/DVDs to MKV files. The interesting bit about this software is that no encoding is done. Eg, for DVDs, it preserves the MPEG2 stream intact. You can latter transcode it if you want (for file size reduction) but you will lose quality in the process.

http://www.makemkv.com/download/

MKV is a open/free format that can be read on all computers and many A/V devices.