Opinions on Audio to Retain/Discard when Converting to MKV?

[Waldonnis 148]

Thanks @@Waldonnis for providing so much detail -- very helpful!

 

Based on everyone's excellent comments I think I'm leaning towards just keeping all tracks. The extra space is not that big of a deal, and I'd rather just do this once and then be covered for all possible future scenarios.

 

My pleasure!  If after a while you find that you never use or care about some of the tracks you kept, you can always go back and remove them by remuxing the file with something like MKVToolNix to save some space.  I've actually be remixing/replacing a few of my stereo tracks recently and having those higher-quality audio streams in the files has come in very handy.  Saves me having to go back and grab them off of the source discs, especially for films that originally spanned two discs like the LotR extended editions (which I manually merge into one file per movie).

[Koleckai Silvestri 1150]

Can you tell me more about why you keep the two-channel track in addition to higher quality tracks?

For devices that don't support the higher definition track.

[legallink 187]

As an FYI, for a lot of devices that don't support more than AAC 2.0, you need to have that track first in your file if you want to avoid transcoding.