CDex is a simple program that extracts music CD audio tracks and converts them to MP3 format.

Audio CDs are multimedia support with a tendency to disappear. This is due to the popularity and convenience of digital music. Even so, many music fans like to preserve original CDs and organize them in a music library. Even so, it is recommended to have a copy of our CDs in MP3 format for convenience or as a precaution. There are audio extractors and converters programs to carry out this task.

CDex extracts in a simple and fast way CDs audio tracks. Its use is very simple, so we have to insert the audio CD into CD Drive and click the “Extract CD tracks to Compressed Audio Files” button. This will start the extraction process and save files to .mp3 in a predefined folder. It is convenient to set up the program properly, so we can have our music library well organized. The first thing we need to do is configure the directory where we will save extracted songs. Then we must set up the pattern file name of the extracted songs. These settings can be accessed from “Options->Settings->General->Directories & Files.”

Another essential step is to introduce our email in the following option: “Options->Settings->CD Database->Remote freedb”. In this way, we will be able to download automatically from freedb, the track names. When the configuration is correct, we can click on “CDDB->Read Remote freedb”, and the names of the songs will be downloaded from the Internet. This is very important because when we extract audio files to a hard disk, these will be named according to the song's title. If there is no information about CD's Tracks in freedb, we can try to download the information from MusicBrainz

Those who want to preserve the maximum CD sound quality can extract the audio tracks without MP3 compression. These files will be saved in WAV format. We can also select the quality of the MP3 file extracted since we can set minimum and maximum bitrate. The program also includes a converter between MP3 and WAV files, which can convert from WAV to MP3, and vice versa. If we want to, we can also extract only the fragment of a song.

To extract audio tracks, we can use the top bar menu o the sidebar buttons.

CDex is one of the first audio extractors that became popular in the early XXI century. Its first version was released in the year 2001 and remained its development until the year 2009. During those years, the program won in functionality and stability. So much so that today the program is fully functional even in the most modern operating Systems (Windows 8 and 8.1).

It is open-source software and is free of charge.