Lime-Colored War Tales 06 - These Are Not For Eating

We're almost to the halfway point of Lime-Colored War Tales, and our brave team of battle vixens is goofing off yet again. This time it's a beach / hot springs episode, which manages to conveniently sneak in some recaps. Also, lots of food is consumed, we get a glimpse into the past of some of the villains, and no mecha summoning takes place whatsoever. But if you thought they were being lazy with this episode, wait until you see some of the DVD improvements.

TV Series & OVA Batch (Nyaa) || TV Series Batch (BakaBT)

New Scene: 10:03~10:40 -- short yet brutal; proof that these new scenes aren't all fun and games.
Enhanced Scene: 14:40~22:20, although it's off-and-on. Reduced steam, transparent hot spring water, and a few other changes.

Rizelmine 05 - First Day of School

It may be the first day of school for lots of students today, but in Rizelmine, it's only the first day of school for one "special" girl. Also, we can see that student-teacher relations are definitely off to a good start at the very beginning of the episode. Actually, I have to commend Rizelmine for being one of the few anime to feature a male student with a pure/innocent crush on a normal female teacher (i.e. not an alien/witch/robot/whatever). It's a refreshing change from all the depraved/perverted female teachers, as seen in Mahoromatic, Haruka Nogizaka's Secret, Hidamari Sketch, DearS, etc.

Batch (Nyaa) || Batch (BakaBT)

Lime-Colored War Tales 05 - Field Trip or Failed Trip?

Well, Asa, it's probably because Lime-Colored War Tales, while busy with bad CG, hokey mecha designs, semi-forced drama, and shameless nudity, still has time to squeeze its characters into anachronistic fetish outfits. The Amanohara class goes on a nature walk, which Shintarou exploits to make Momen feel slightly more competent. She succeeds, but the others are a bit worse for wear. And of course, the enemy is lurking in the skies and the bushes, ready to take advantage of any weakness they perceive.

I'd thought that the lack of added scenes in this episode would spare me from translation work, but I thought wrong. As it turns out, there's an insert song that ANBU-AonE did not translate, so I went a bit "above and beyond" to look up the lyrics and add them in. Don't worry, there's no exploding panties or karaoke effects of any kind, much like the To Heart ~Remember my Memories~ insert karaoke that I did.

TV Series & OVA Batch (Nyaa) || TV Series Batch (BakaBT)

New Scenes: None
Enhanced Scene: 3:55 ~ 05:45 (certain things are missing)

Rizelmine 04 - Marital Games on Motorcycles

Yeah, I remember one time when I took my students out of the classroom for an outdoor-class type activity. It was in the spring semester, and they wanted to enjoy a nice day after getting through a somewhat harsh winter. And I also remember that they repaid me for my kindness by hiding a bunch of dirt clods in my backpack. How old were these students, you ask? I think they were mostly freshmen. College freshmen, that is.

Anyway, you can now enjoy my release of Rizelmine 04, where Rizel becomes a master of disguise and seamlessly infiltrates Tomonori's school. Massive amounts of mayhem and explosions are to be expected, but we also get a first look at another significant male character... who takes a particular interest in the hairbell-ringing newcomer.

Batch (Nyaa) || Batch (BakaBT)

Lime-Colored War Tales 04 - Seductive Reasoning

As the Amanohara changes course on its to Lushun, trouble is afoot on the lower decks. One of Sarasa's priceless imported objects has gone missing, so it's time to don some detective garb and do some sleuthing. But the enemy's doing some investigation of their own, and sometimes, blind heroism doesn't pay. And did I do a ridiculously out-of-context screenshot? You'll have to watch and find out.

LCWT is a lot like Soul Link in its voice casting: famous, popular VAs for many male roles, relatively obscure VAs for the female roles. Of them, Ai Shimizu (Momen) is easily the best-known, while Yuka Aimoto (Rinzu) has had no other major roles -- just a couple of bit parts in Canvas 2 and Mouse. It's a shame, as I really liked Aimoto mysterious/soft-spoken/cryptic/Yamato-Nadeshiko/emotionless-girl performance. If she'd gotten more parts, maybe we would've heard more variety instead of having VAs like Mamiko Noto and Kana Hanazawa in absolutely everything.

TV Series & OVA Batch (Nyaa) || TV Series Batch (BakaBT)

New Scene: 07:41~09:04 (featuring Rinzu, and actually makes some subsequent lines make more sense than they did in the TV version)
Enhanced Scene: 09:04~10:20 (less steam)

Rizelmine 03 - Walk like a man, smell like a man

Much to Rizel's dismay, she finds out that Tomonori has the opposite of a scent fetish. Hilarity ensues in her numerous attempts to overcome the situation. And if you're assuming anything from the picture above, it's probably not what you think. Unless that you think that some comical, quasi-abusive, non-sexual violence is about to occur.

Batch (Nyaa) || Batch (BakaBT)

Take the audio conversion challenge!

So yeah, I should be working on Rizelmine or some other stuff, but I've been trying to solve a vexing puzzle for a future project. As I mentioned in the past, I want to re-release the Summer 2002 series that Master of Entertainment sandwiched between the two halves of Rizelmine, G-On Riders. I managed to obtain these DVD raws, which are a definite improvement over the TV-rips, but are unfortunately encoded in .wmv with WMV3 video and Microsoft ACM audio. After changing the file names to remove Japanese characters, I managed to feed ep 01 into GraphEdit, insert the Haali Matroskamuxer filter, and create an .mkv for future muxing.

The obstacle here is the audio -- it won't load in Aegisub for retiming, it can't be extracted "as-is" by mkvextract, and it refuses to be transcoded. I was able to isolate the audio by remuxing the .mkv in mkvmerge without the video, although that raises questions of what the correct file extension should be. (.mka? .wav? .wma? .acm?)

The resulting audio file can be found here.

So, viewers, leechers, and citizens of the broader Internet, I turn to you for help: can anyone find a way to transcode this POS ancient audio track into something usable, like .mp3, ogg, or aac? As far as settings go, 192 kbps should be more than enough.

Programs I've attempted and failed with:
Audacity
Free Audio Converter
Avidemux
AnalogX Converter
AoA Audio Extractor Basic
Handbrake (no surprise that it failed)

Many of them will allow the file to be loaded, but pressing convert brings up an instantly-complete progress window, and results in a 0-byte or very small ( <1 MB) audio file. Free Audio converter actually took some time in "Processing," but then seems to hang forever after the progress bar completes.

If the audio can't be transcoded, I see my options as:

1) Use the 128 kbps mp3 audio from the TV-rips, and hope/pray that everything lines up properly. Lots of risk of desync, plus it's low-bitrate audio encoded back in 2002.
2) Play the audio file itself or the original raw in a media player, use Audacity to record the audio to another format in real-time, and remux with the video. Not only would that be time-consuming, but I'd have to compensate for human-error delays between me starting the file and starting the recording.