CDex

Last updated
CDex
Cdex 1.84 on Windows 10.jpg
CDex software program at the 1.84 release in use on Windows 10
Developer(s) Albert Faber, Georgy Berdyshev
Initial release2000;22 years ago (2000)
Stable release
2.24 / 12 August 2020;17 months ago (2020-08-12)
Written in C, C++, Python
Operating system Microsoft Windows
Type CD ripper
License Freeware (ad supported)
Website cdex.mu

CDex is a free software package for Digital Audio Extraction from Audio CD (a so-called CD ripper) 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 under the terms of the GNU General Public License (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.

Contents

Features

CDex is able to convert CD audio into several formats including WAV, Vorbis, MP3 (using the LAME encoder), VQF, Musepack, APE, and many others. As of version 1.70b2 FLAC encoding is native, but for version 1.51 FLAC [1] and other codecs can be used by using an external encoder. It supports CD-Text 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) for automatic tagging, naming and sorting of ripped files. [2] It also includes cdparanoia 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. [3] 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 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 includes the adware OpenCandy.

In November 2017 version 1.96 was released. [4] 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, 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. [5]

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 [6] 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.

Related Research Articles

An audio file format is a file format for storing digital audio data on a computer system. The bit layout of the audio data is called the audio coding format and can be uncompressed, or compressed to reduce the file size, often using lossy compression. The data can be a raw bitstream in an audio coding format, but it is usually embedded in a container format or an audio data format with defined storage layer.

MusicBrainz Online music metadata database

MusicBrainz is a project that aims to create a collaborative music database that is similar to the freedb project. MusicBrainz was founded in response to the restrictions placed on the Compact Disc Database (CDDB), a database for software applications to look up audio CD information on the Internet. MusicBrainz has expanded its goals to reach beyond a CD metadata storehouse to become a structured online database for music.

Ogg Open container format maintained by the Xiph.Org Foundation

Ogg is a free, open container format maintained by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The authors of the Ogg format state that it is unrestricted by software patents and is designed to provide for efficient streaming and manipulation of high-quality digital multimedia. Its name is derived from "ogging", jargon from the computer game Netrek.

Vorbis Royalty-free lossy audio encoding format

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 conjunction with the Ogg container format and it is therefore often referred to as Ogg Vorbis.

XMMS Free and open source audio player

X Multimedia System (XMMS) is an audio player for Unix-like systems released under a free software license.

FLAC Lossless digital audio coding format

FLAC is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference software package that includes a codec implementation. Digital audio compressed by FLAC's algorithm can typically be reduced to between 50 and 70 percent of its original size and decompresses to an identical copy of the original audio data.

Monkey's Audio is an algorithm and file format for lossless audio data compression. Lossless data compression does not discard data during the process of encoding, unlike lossy compression methods such as AAC, MP3, Vorbis, and Opus. Therefore, it may be decompressed to a file that is identical to the source material.

K3b Optical disc authoring software

K3b is a CD and DVD authoring application by KDE for Unix-like computer operating systems. It provides a graphical user interface to perform most CD/DVD burning tasks like creating an Audio CD from a set of audio files or copying a CD/DVD, as well as more advanced tasks such as burning eMoviX CD/DVDs. It can also perform direct disc-to-disc copies. The program has many default settings which can be customized by more experienced users. The actual disc recording in K3b is done by the command line utilities cdrecord or cdrkit, cdrdao, and growisofs. As of version 1.0, K3b features a built-in DVD ripper.

WavPack is a free and open-source lossless audio compression format and application implementing the format. It is unique in the way that it supports hybrid audio compression alongside normal compression which is similar to how FLAC works. It also supports compressing a wide variety of lossless formats, including various variants of PCM and also DSD as used in SACDs, together with its support for surround audio.

ffdshow Open-source unmaintained codec library

ffdshow is an open-source unmaintained codec library that is mainly used for decoding of video in the MPEG-4 ASP and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video formats, but it supports numerous other video and audio formats as well. It is free software released under GNU General Public License 2.0, runs on Windows, and is implemented as a Video for Windows (VFW) codec and a DirectShow filter.

Grip (software) CD ripper

Grip is a free Compact Disc player and CD ripper.

Sound eXchange (SoX) is a cross-platform audio editing software. It has a command-line interface, and is written in standard C. It is free software, licensed under GPL-2.0-or-later, with libsox licensed under LGPL-2.1-or-later, and distributed by Chris Bagwell through SourceForge.

Exact Audio Copy

Exact Audio Copy (EAC) is a CD ripping program for Microsoft Windows. The program has been developed by Andre Wiethoff since 1998. Wiethoff's motivation for creating the program was that other such software only performed jitter correction while scratched CDs often produce distortions.

Jokosher Digital audio editor for Linux and Windows

Jokosher is a free software, non-linear multi-track digital audio editor, released under the GPL-2.0-only. It is written in Python, using the GTK+ interface and GStreamer as an audio back-end, initially just for the Linux operating system but also with support for Windows.

Audiograbber

Audiograbber is a proprietary freeware CD audio extractor/converter program for Microsoft Windows. It was one of the first programs in the genre to become popular. The data extraction algorithm was designed by Jackie Franck and was included in the Xing Technology software package Xing Audio Catalyst in the mid-1990s.

Asunder (software) Free and open-source graphical audio CD ripper program for Unix-like systems

Asunder is a free and open-source graphical audio CD ripper program for Unix-like systems. It doesn't have dependencies to the GNOME libraries or libraries of other desktop environments. It functions as a front-end for cdparanoia.

SUPER (computer program) Front-end for video players and encoders

Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Recorder (SUPER) is a closed-source adware front end for open-source software video players and encoders provided by the FFmpeg, MEncoder, MPlayer, x264, ffmpeg2theora, musepack, Monkey's Audio, True Audio, WavPack, libavcodec, and the Theora/Vorbis RealProducer plugIn projects. It was first released in 2005. SUPER provides a graphical user interface to these back-end programs, which use a command-line interface.

Puddletag

Puddletag is a graphical audio file metadata editor ("tagger") for Unix-like operating systems.

fre:ac Audio converter and CD ripper

fre:ac is a free audio converter and CD extractor for Windows, Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD, distributed under the GPL-2.0-or-later.

DeaDBeeF Audio player

DeaDBeeF is an audio player software available for Linux, Android and other Unix-like operating systems. DeaDBeeF is free and open-source software, except on Android.

References

  1. ↑ "Using CDex with Flac hints". Pfarrell.com. Archived from the original on 2010-01-25. Retrieved 2010-05-28.
  2. ↑ Christian Brochec: Audacity 2: Enregistrez, montez, mixez. 2nd edition, Pearson Education France, 2012, ISBN   978-2-7440-9402-6, chapter: CD, section: Extraction audio aved CDex (Windows), page 96
  3. ↑ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2000-03-04. Retrieved 2016-04-10.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  4. ↑ "Project home page" . Retrieved 2018-03-05.
  5. ↑ "How to use the gnudb.org site". GNU Database. Archived from the original on 2012-01-21.
  6. ↑ "beware of adware/malware". alternativeto.net. Archived from the original on 2015-12-08. Retrieved 2015-11-28.
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