attack7

I was interested in the prospect of using DVDs to play music, so despite my hatred of Roxio as a company (the upgrade price for their software is $99, the same as buying it new - bastards) I got a new DVD drive that came bundled with Toast Titanium 7. It has the ability to burn a "Music DVD" - basically a somewhat clever manipulation of DVD menus to create a very large capacity disc with graphic menus for playlists complete with album art.

Making the DVD is easy - you can drag folders full of mp3s (like, each album or playlist) to the program, it creates menus for you - (or you can photoshop up your own, not really easy, but not too hard for someone who knows photoshop) - then encodes all your songs into Dolby Digital 2.1 and burns the DVD.

Plusses:
You can fit about 50 hours of music on a single DVD - that's a LOT.
There are some sample DVD menus that are decently plain enough for music
Making the things is easy
The 2.1 Dolby Digital encoding makes the ML system shine

Minuses:
Because of the way the DVD is burned, you can't fast forward or rewind songs
There could be more sample menus
Sometimes the controls are a little wacky -- track 4 will end and track 1 will start playing. I'm sure this is a dvd encoding issue, not something the ML system is doing
Would be cool if the touch screen let you access dvd menus by touch, rather than arrow keys, but that's hard to do.


So this got me thinking - this DVD sounds *great* especially compared to MP3 CDs or the iPod integration. It leads me to believe that either (a) there's something wrong with my amp -- I know there is because of sound dropouts, etc that needs to be addressed, but am not sure it causes a sound problem or (b) the software that plays mp3s is very, very different from eveything else such that the stereo imaging is just terrible. MP3s, with either DSP on or off, sound awful, and these same MP3s encoded as DD 2.1 and played via the DVD sound *fantastic* Anyone have any ideas on this?


Matt