Music DVD .. 10 Hours of Audio? Slideshow??

Question

Roxio Toast has a Music DVD option that can add hours of audio on a single DVD.
I tried to look for info on how to do this in Encore .. but there is nothing.
As a slideshow, my test only had three audio files .. which took up 1/4 of the disk.
What is the smallest audio file to import into Encore? I used a mp3. I saw a transcoding menu pop-up that converted the m.mp3 to ac3
Can I save space and steps to do this?
Anybody make a Music DVD before?

Answer 1

Music DVD - how I have come to loathe that description, along with the equally ghastly "Audio DVD".
Both usually mean DVD-Video containing music, and should definitely not get confused with DVD-Audio although well authored DVD-A discs will also play on video only players.
Pharther Phurther wrote:
Roxio Toast has a Music DVD option that can add hours of audio on a single DVD.
I tried to look for info on how to do this in Encore .. but there is nothing.
As a slideshow, my test only had three audio files .. which took up 1/4 of the disk.
What is the smallest audio file to import into Encore? I used a mp3. I saw a transcoding menu pop-up that converted the m.mp3 to ac3
Can I save space and steps to do this?
Anybody make a Music DVD before?
Frequently - Encore is somewhat limited in this respect because the DVD specifications were not really set up with audio playback as the primary stream type so it's always a bit of a fudge getting things right as changing any video or graphic asset forces the audio to change right along with it.
I suspect that the Roxio app you mention is cheating by what it is not telling you - reading it carefully I see no mention of any visuals or imagery being used, so I think it is simply taking one timeline of audio and matching it up to a blank video stream, and allowing you to add markers as chapter marks.
The result would be many hours of audio to blank screens....
Launch Encore.
At the splash, choose "New Project" and set according to TV Standard - PAL if in Europe, NTSC just about everywhere else.
Set "Default Transcode Settings" to suit - automatic transcoding to a maximum of 6 mbps (just to be safe) and the audio form to Dolby Digital.
To get this done the best way is to get all your audio imported into a project first. I would not use MP3 if I could use anything else as it is a form that is already heavily data reduced, and is also not a DVD legal format so must be changed into one that is. Encore will do this automatically to either LPCM or Dolby Digital (depending on your project transcode settings) by decoding the MP3 back to 32-bit floating point PCM and from there into Dolby Digital (ac3) at 192 kbps which is about the same as the average mp3 file. Downside here is that a heavily reduced file just got even more heavily reduced so quality loss is a very high possibility as despite the claims of Roxio, Dolby Digital is not particularly high quality. But I digress.
Now, you can have up to 99 titles in any DVD, each one with up to 99 chapters.
So, put any imported asset to a new timeline, and add chapter markers as needed.
Do not add any video or graphical assets as this will trigger video encoding which will greatly reduce the available space.
You will need eiother a basic menu, or else you will have to link everything together in the flowchart, making sure you set a FIRST PLAY and to link the end action of one timeline to the start of the next or you will get a coaster. It might be a good plan to get a +RW disc and practise this a few times.
Now - adding any still images is difficult. If the audio is segued, you cannot do a slideshow - even with Scenarist! All you can do if the audio is segued (a live performance, or a continuous piece) is either not have chapter points or have one "slideshow" per piece. You can only do this in a standard timeline set to blank (not black) video.
Compile and test - you will have a disc full of straight audio.