How to join 2 AC3 / DTS tracks ?

[zoidberg]

alexp120,

If your question is regarding the OP's question (ie joining two audio streams of identical codec/bitrate) then yes an A/V receiver will play it just fine. Any DTS or AC-3 file that has been edited 'bit-perfect' has essentially been cut and pasted together in a similar fashion, likewise titles with seamless branching. The only distortion you will hear will be that which is present on the original files. Error correction should take care of any corrupted frames (if in doubt run the finished file through eac3to to check it's clean).

Obviously if you want to edit to a finer tolerance than the audio frame size, or wish to perform fades/crossfades then you will need to transcode to a lossless format to carry out the work then re-encode for playback.

[alexp120]

I apologize to you all. I misread the question in the title of the thread. I thought that the person wanted to join an AC-3 bitstream clip with a DTS bitstream clip. Instead, he wanted to join 2 AC-3 clips together or join 2 DTS clips together.

That is why I was concerned about how the AVR and speakers would react if one bitstream switched to another bitstream playback.

[zoidberg]

In theory the receiver should react the same way it does when you change audio tracks on a DVD/Blu ray (or go from 2.0 to 5.1 on HDTV).
I'm not entirely sure you'd be able to merge two audio files of different codecs though as they would have different file extensions, which is why transcoding and re-encoding were suggested.

[Doctor M]

For AC-3 I'd probably go with MPEG Video Wizard to avoid possible issues at the join or differences in dialog normalization and such.