CDex is a free software package for Digital Audio Extraction from

Audio CD Compact Disc Digital Audio (CDDA or CD-DA), also known as Digital Audio Compact Disc or simply as Audio CD, is the standard format for audio compact discs. The standard is defined in the ''Red Book'', one of a series of Rainbow Books (named ...

(a so-called

CD ripper A CD ripper, CD grabber, or CD extractor is software that rips raw digital audio in Compact Disc Digital Audio (CD-DA) format tracks on a compact disc to standard computer sound files, such as WAV or MP3. A more formal term used for the proc ...

) and audio format conversion for Microsoft Windows. It converts CDDA tracks from a CD to standard computer sound files, such as WAV, MP3, or Ogg Vorbis. CDex was previously released as

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

under the terms of the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general ...

(GPL); however, although the website claims that this is still the case, no source code has been released since 2005. It was originally written by Albert L. Faber, and is developed and maintained by Georgy Berdyshev. Recent versions of the software may be compromised and a security threat.

Features

CDex is able to convert CD audio into several formats including

WAV Waveform Audio File Format (WAVE, or WAV due to its filename extension; pronounced "wave") is an audio file format standard, developed by IBM and Microsoft, for storing an audio bitstream on PCs. It is the main format used on Microsoft Wind ...

Vorbis Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder (codec) for lossy audio compression. Vorbis is most commonly used in conj ...

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...

(using the

LAME Lame or LAME may refer to: Music * "Lame" (song) by Unwritten Law * ''Lame'' (album) by Iame People * Ibrahim Lame (born 1953), Nigerian educator and politician * Jennifer Lame (), American film editor * Quintín Lame (1880–1967), Colombian ...

encoder), VQF,

Musepack Musepack or MPC is an open source lossy audio codec, specifically optimized for transparent compression of stereo audio at bitrates of 160–180 (manual set allows bitrates up to 320) kbit/s. It was formerly known as MPEGplus, MPEG+ or MP+ ...

APE Apes (collectively Hominoidea ) are a clade of Old World simians native to sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia (though they were more widespread in Africa, most of Asia, and as well as Europe in prehistory), which together with its sister g ...

, and many others. As of version 1.70b2 FLAC encoding is native, but for version 1.51 FLAC and other codecs can be used by using an external encoder. It supports

CD-Text CD-Text is an extension of the Red Book Compact Disc specifications standard for audio CDs. It allows storage of additional information (e.g. album name, song name, and artist name) on a standards-compliant audio CD. The specification for CD ...

to allow ripped tracks, with reduced user effort, to have the names of songs, artists and albums. It can also automatically identify (most) inserted audio CDs and look up the metadata by means of an online database (

freedb Freedb was a database of compact disc track listings, where all the content was under the GNU General Public License. To look up CD information over the Internet, a client program calculated a hash function from the CD table of contents and used ...

) for automatic tagging, naming and sorting of ripped files. It also includes

cdparanoia cdparanoia is a compact disc ripper for *nix and BeOS, developed by Xiph.org. It is designed to be a minimalistic, high-quality CD ripper that would be able to compensate for and adjust to poor hardware to produce a flawless rip. libparanoia ...

for robust CD reading. CDex is considered to be very configurable and relatively easy to use.

History

In 2000, at the start of the beta phase for version 1.30, CDex was turned into a free software project (''cdexos'': ''CDex Open Source'') and hosted on SourceForge.net. In January 2006, the CDex homepage requested a new project manager and developer, implying that Albert L. Faber had abandoned development of CDex. On 5 June 2006, CDex 1.70 Beta 1 was released via the SourceForge.net website (ascribed to Georgy Berdyshev). It was the first official update to the program in almost three years, with CDex 1.70 Beta 2 following soon after on 23 June 2006. In 2008 Berdyshev was joined by Ariane Gomes as project developers. On 18 November 2009 CDex 1.70 Beta 4 was released. CDex 1.70 Final was released on 29 June 2014 featuring a Unicode and Multibyte version. On 30 June 2007, just one day after the release of the

GPLv3 The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general u ...

, the license of CDex was updated. However, the last version for which source code was made available is 1.70 Beta 2, and the SourceForge project appears to have been shut down in July 2015, shortly after the release of version 1.79. From version 1.76 the

installer Installation (or setup) of a computer program (including device drivers and plugins), is the act of making the program ready for execution. Installation refers to the particular configuration of a software or hardware with a view to making it us ...

includes the

adware Adware, often called advertising-supported software by its developers, is software that generates revenue for its developer by automatically generating online advertisements in the user interface of the software or on a screen presented to the ...

OpenCandy OpenCandy is an adware module and a potentially unwanted program classified as malware by many anti-virus vendors. They flag OpenCandy due to its undesirable side-effects. It is designed to run during installation of other desired software. Produc ...

. In November 2017 version 1.96 was released. It is not clear who is the current code maintainer, and no contact details are provided. Four further versions were released by March 2018. The default Remote Server database in CDEx,

Freedb Freedb was a database of compact disc track listings, where all the content was under the GNU General Public License. To look up CD information over the Internet, a client program calculated a hash function from the CD table of contents and used ...

, became inaccessible by June 2020. The gnudb.org site at location gnudb.gnudb.org (on HTTP port 80) using proxy.gnudb.org works as a replacement for the inactive default Remote Server database.

Potential risk

The recent reincarnation of CDex has seen a number of sponsored programs being automatically selected during installation with little information about their nature. Scan results suggest there may be a substantial risk to any system these are installed on along with the source code no longer being publicly accessible, preventing independent code review. This project should be considered as exploited by the new maintainer and should not be trusted. This project should not be trusted or installed on your machine. As the new maintainer has taken over new releases have been pushed out showing activity, the support links are broken, the ticketing system does not exist and is a broken link, there are no contact details or method to interact with the developer and the installer is installing adware without any notifications. The new maintainer has exploited the strong reputation and work of the project and turned it into mechanism to profit. Updates are being made to the application, including the installer with hidden software being installed. Later versions apparently also add artifacts to ends of certain tracks that are ripped by the program. Rolling back to an earlier version of the program eliminates this issue.

References

External links

* {{Official website, http://cdex.mu/ Windows CD ripping software Software that bundles malware