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  Hi Dave. By "channel mapping," I mean that the specs allow for any single audio channel to be specifically directed to any available channel in the speaker setup....
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I haven't found any references confirming what you are saying.  My understanding is that DVD-Audio defines 21 preset channel mappings - and you have to choose from one of those 21 when authoring the disk.

There is only one channel mapping defined for a single-channel audio stream, and that is to map it to speaker "C".  I would expect that in a Stereo environment, the downmixing performed by the DVD-Audio player would map that channel equally to L and R.

Maybe what you are referring to are features of DVD-Audio authoring programs that let you assign any input mono file to any channel - but if you are only providing a single mono file, then your only choice is to map it to C.  Two channels can only go to L and R, and only with three or more channels do you get any choices (L,R,C or L,R,lfe or L,R,S)

The channel-assignment table listing assignments 1 to 21 can be seen here:

[a href="http://www.hodie-world.com/dvdtech2.html]http://www.hodie-world.com/dvdtech2.html[/url]

Dave.
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  I stand corrected, although I was certain I had encountered contradicting information at some point in the past! Still, if the link you provided is accurate (and I have no reason to suppose the author would want it to be anything but accurate) then the situation is exactly as you have described. My apologies.
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Hi,

This project seems really interesting.

If I would use it: - (just to give you a view on what I would like to be able to do with it)-

I would really be interested in using it to encode the audio to MP3, AAC, OGG, and other formats in many different bitrates and at very high quality at each bitrate- time shouldn't matter to much. Mainly, to use in conjunction with VirtualDub to encode avi files.

I have really been looking for a program like this for ever since I've wanted to have the process of encoding video/audio to avi files simplified. And I've wanted to write a guide on it where I could recommend programs that wouldn't be mostly useless or hard to use.
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Excellent work, davechapman.  I'm glad that someone has taken on such a project, because it could be a real boon to the advancement of the audio format.

I would hope that (although unlikely) we'll see some commercially released material in the distant future that is open, and unencrypted.  I'd almost recommend that people don't buy encrypted DVD-As, because they prevent us from exercising our fair use right to make a backup copy, and to listen to it without having the media present.
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Great! I bet there are hordes of us waiting for this software. Not that I'd yet have a DVD-A capable player but soon, I guess if this really works.
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Woo-Hoo! I will download and try it! Bravo Davechapman!
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I have just made the first "alpha' release of my DVD-Audio authoring program, dvda-author.  It's available at:

http://dvd-audio.sourceforge.net/alpha/

The ZIP file contains both the source code and a pre-compiled windows executable. 

The main development platform is Linux.  It should compile without problems on Mac OS X, but I haven't tested it.

The start of a basic "how-to" is at http://dvd-audio.sourceforge.net/howto.shtml

The current version is limited to 16-bit Stereo audio at all six DVD-Audio samplerates (44.1KHz, 48KHz, 88.2KHz, 96KHz, 176.4KHz, 192KHz), but 20/24-bit audio and multi-channel are next on my to-do list.

For people uncomfortable with command-line programs, I am also working on a GUI version, but that's not high on my priority list at the moment.

Dave.
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Hi Dave. A couple of quick questions:

  1) Is the new version (March 23) able to produce gapless playback yet, or is that feature dependent upon indexing?

  2) Once indexing is implemented, will there be some internal way to concatenate and track *.wav files, or would it be simpler to use an outside program (i.e., shntool join -o wav *.wav combined with shntool cue *.wav > joined.cue)?

  Beautiful work you are doing! I'm amazed it took anyone this long to attempt such a project, but glad to know that it's finally being done right.

The behaviour of dvda-author (since the very first release) has always  been gapless - I wouldn't author discs any other way.

I may support cue files in the future, but for now, you simply do "dvda-author -o DVD -g *.wav" and that will give you gapless playback - if the WAV files are all the same format (samplerate, bitdepth etc).   You can use multiple (up to 9) "-g *.wav" options to specify up to 9 different groups of tracks.

Within one group, you can have a completely random selection of audio formats - you are not limited to a single format (either by dvda-author or the DVD-A standard) to a single audio format per group.

  3) Does the authoring tool currently support monophonic/single-channel content, or will that be added with the yet-to-accomplish multi-channel capabilities?
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... So dvda-author now supports 16-bit mono or stereo files at all supported samplerates (44.1KHz up to 192KHz).
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Logical Structure: Albums, Groups and Tracks
DVD-Audio players that read AMG (all except simple Audio-only players) are able to take advantage of DVD-Audio’s capacity to organize material hierarchically rather than simply linearly. This logical hierarchy exists in parallel to the format’s data structure. It is based on five different levels: album, group, title, track and index.

Each side of a DVD-Audio disc contains one album. Each album may contain up to nine groups, each of which is essentially a playlist specifying the playback order of a number of titles. While any title may contain up to 99 tracks, there may be no more than 99 tracks total within a single group.

As on a CD, a track may be thought of as a single audio program (i.e. a song). Audio attributes such as channel configuration, sample-rate, and word-length may be changed on track boundaries (players may mute during such attribute changes). An index is a reference point to a portion of an audio track (cell), and there may be up to 99 indices within a single track.

Edit: Ignore the question above, since I found clarification. But that in turn changes the question! The Sonic White Paper (see below) indicates - assuming I understand correctly - that *.wav files, as they are currently being added, qualify as "titles." But the limitation you specified in your announcement of the software seemed to indicate they were being treated as "tracks." Or have I misunderstood?

  The revised question 4 would be, "If I have a few hundred songs in a collection, and would like the option to 'Play All,' must I concatenate subsets into single tracks and divide them with indices to accomplish this goal?" Obviously, if groups will not automatically segue from one to the next, simply grouping would not be a satisfactory solution.
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I created my first DVD Audio disc with dvda-author, but I only can try to play it in two weeks, because my DVD Audio Player is at home in another town.
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I've noticed that new release support flac as input file, which is also great. Do you plan to support cue/wav or cue/flac images as input file? For example one group would be created from a cue/wav image, and dvda-author itself will create tracks based on cue sheet information.
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