there are tons of applications you can use to capture/convert audio (AC3, PCM/WAV, and MP2 - which is on SOME 'homemade' dvds i've gotten). you can do TotalRecorder (or if you have Adobe Audition, it will work) to record the WAV file in real time as the DVD is played on your PC. but that takes at least *real time* + time to split up the tracks, add fade ins/outs (if you like), maybe normalize the audio if the level is low.

here's how i do it most efficiently. again, this is by no means the *best* or only way to do it, but it works quite nicely for me.

1- use SmartRipper (under settings, make sure it's set to split by "filesize" and have the file size set to something large like 8000); click on the "Enable Stream processing" tab, Un-check the video track (and everything else aside from the audio track you want); make sure that "Demux to extra file" is selected, and click on the "rip" button.

2- if it's AC3 audio (which is on a lot of official DVDs, although PCM stereo tracks are on more and more DVD concert releases, some still only have AC3 audio... e.g. Coldplay Live DVD doesn't have PCM audio, i don't think)... then i use a program called PX3 which decodes the AC3 to WAV format VERY quickly, the program (PX3) has a "Normalize" option you can check mark or not. it's very easy and fast to use.

3- resample the audio stream (48>44.1 kHz). i do this in Audition. but there are plenty of software applications that will do this (WaveLab, Goldwave, etc.). even the newer version of Nero does it automatically (no extra processing or converting time used, just drag & drop the WAV files into a new Audio CD compilation). although i haven't taken the time to listen closely to how well it does vs. Audition, it's a "quick & dirty" way of doing this step.

4- i usually use Feurio to burn audio cds. so, i fire it up, spend 5 minutes using its built-in WAV Editor to tell it where to insert track marks. voila. audio cds burned without any clicks/pops. i know Nero has a WAV Editor of its own, so if you wanted to, you could probably just rip the audio stream from the DVD using SmartRipper (as described above) > use PX3 to convert to WAV (if necessary) > use Nero to "author" (define track marks) and burn the audio cds.