Better DVD Menu Music

I was sure it was a bug. After I’d laid out my first DVD project in iDVD 3, I went to add looping background music to the numerous submenus. (The DVD contained more than 50 chapters.) Because I’d written most of the music for the rest of the DVD at 105 beats per minute (bpm), I used that tempo for the menu loops. That’s when I discovered that iDVD would only set menu durations in whole seconds. And according to my Experimental Tempo Calculator, two bars of music at 105bpm last 4.571 seconds.

I experimented with stretching the tempo to 96 and 120bpm, which generate integer duration values (5 seconds and 4 seconds, respectively). But still, every time the menu looped, there was an audible glitch. Because I had rendered the audio loops in Ableton Live, I knew they were sample-accurate (that is, exactly the specified duration), so I assumed iDVD was causing the discontinuity. It was time to ship the disc, so I left it at that.

Then I noticed something odd: Every other commercial DVD I played faded out the menu music before the loop point. Could the looping glitch be a limitation of the DVD format itself?

Yesterday at Macworld, I got a chance to ask DVD expert Bruce Nazarian that very question, and he confirmed that the looping glitch is indeed a format limitation. In order to create a seamless loop, the player would need to read ahead and do some fancy splicing behind the scenes. Nazarian believes the problem will might still exist in the next-generation HD-DVD and Blu-Ray formats.

The need to fade out DVD menu loops is frustrating, but it’s another good illustration that the challenges in digital media are usually equally divided between technical and aesthetic issues. When I asked Nazarian what the optimal fadeout length was, he said it should depend on the type of music and the effect you want to achieve.

[Updated 2006-01-15 with Nazarian’s request to change “will” to “might.” —David]

Heard any good menu music lately? How long are the fades?