My girlfriend bought me the Jools Holland 10th Anniversary DVD for christmas and it's rarely been out of the player since. My question is, is there an easy way to rip the soundtrack so I can put it on my empegs? I can reconfigure the optical out on the DVD player to output PCM instead of 5.1 and then I could connect the computer to that and use Total Recorder. But is there a better, nicer way to it?

I had a brief dalliance with try to convert DVDs to VCDs a couple of years ago and had to download what seemed like a mass of little programs to individual things. Is there now a one-size-fits-all approach now? What software would I need, bearing in mind I only want the audio?

Total Recorder

Oh well, I'll give Total Recorder a try....

I've always just used SmartRipper and DVD2AVI. It's pretty simple, and it's a prefect rip of the audio.

Edit:
As a side note: In *nix you can use transcode and dvd::rip. The latest version adds support for ripping a selected audio track to WAV.

As a postscript to my ripping (get it?) yarn. I ended up using SmartRipper to grab the vobs and decode the AC3 out of them.

Because I didn't want to do anything with the video I ended up using beSweet with the VOB input DLL to convert the AC3 to a WAV which I then cut up in Cool Edit Pro 2 and then nogapped in lame. Lovely stuff!

Now I have to transcode my new Depeche Mode DVD but thats got an LPCM soundtrack, back to square one? Possibly...

Of course, this has those programs running inside it, and will rip DVD video as well.

Cool, i'll grab a copy of that as well!

I use mplayer. It can rip an audio track (or any other part) directly from a DVD to a file.

One last thing, when you asked 'Do you want to downsample to 44.1K' you say, YES!

It sounds really crap otherwise, I believe this is because the DAC on the empeg is locked at 44.1 so realtime conversion takes place, and it don't sound pretty!

Thanks for the introduction to BeSweet. I found it quite handy. I used it to rip my signed copy of An Evening With Kevin Smith. It is incredibly feature rich, and I have since used it to batch convert some other AC3 files I had laying around.