It has been a very long time since I played around with ripping audio from audio CDs and wrote software for audio handling. I lost access to that source code some 20 years ago, so part of this post is from memory. Hopefully that is still good memory (:

Yes, I am one of those old farts that still has computing equipment with optical drives (:

Much has improved since then, so one needs to write far less code nowadays as a of tooling is now open source or has been open source for quite some time. The hardest part was finding back CDex (which I think is still very useful especially as it handles not-so-well-handled audio CDs quite OK).

Anyway: I didn’t document much of my audio history. The only post I mentioned CDex in was Streaming your mp3 collection through an Icecast server using ezstream, which does not does it justice as back then it had been reliable for such a long time.

Funeral web-site

That web-site was horrible, especially as it was picky on audio formats. In the end, it handled 128-bit fixed bit-rate MP3 files best.

CDEX

The relation with the world at large with CDex is complicated. For a long time it had been very reliable: regular new versions, solid UI and behaviour and CDex was very much OK with not so well-handled audio CDs. This works even better on Linux because there it uses the cdparanoia mode.

In addition to the reliability, it had source code available on SourceForge at [Wayback/Archive] CDex | Open Source Digital Audio CD Extractor with more than 45,000,000 downloads, but it vanished there.

Already in 2006, at version 1.51, the maintainer sought one or more people to take over the project [Wayback/Archive] CDex needs your help!.

New maintainer regularly released new subversions until November 2011: [Wayback/Archive] CDex | Open Source Digital Audio CD Extractor with more than 38,000,000 downloads: New version: CDex 1.70 Beta 4 released.

It took almost 5 years for a new release: [Wayback/Archive] CDex | Open Source Digital Audio CD Extractor with more than 55,000,000 downloads New stable version: CDex 1.70 released

This version is the final release for CDex 1.70 for both Unicode and Multibyte.

It features many bug fixes, internal updates and updates to encoders.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

After the vanishing, it didn’t turn up at GitHub itself, but GitHub still does have a few CDex related repositories but none contain the full SourceForge history (history is one of the most important assets in a repository):

• [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – elha/CDex: famous CD-Ripper, new version 1.71, this is a cloned Repo from cdexos.sourceforge.net with fixed cddb-bug
  
  
  
  • It has a zipped release [Wayback] github.com/elha/CDex/raw/master/Install/cdex_171_enu.zip at the time of writing, it seems clean: [Wayback/Archive] VirusTotal – URL: https://github.com/elha/CDex/raw/master/Install/cdex_171_enu.zip
  
  
  • Contrary to the directory name that is not an installer, but a zip of the standalone version.
  
  
  • The zip file does not include the fix for [Wayback/Archive] Can’t Run, Want Project to Live On · Issue #1 · elha/CDex · GitHub (commit [Wayback/Archive] Fixes Issue #1: program tried to write missing translations to file c… · wech71/CDex@0016bf6 · GitHub)
  
  
  • Which means you have to manually rebuild it from source.
  
  
  
  

Also vanished was a way automatically obtain song meta data like artist and album/track title as the original CDDB had become Gracenote while at the same time disallowing public use, and the Freedb that stepped up to fill the CDDB gap ending because of licensing issues also ended up in bit-heaven, but that took close to 20 years. The original premise of CDDB was powerful: the central data could be amended by end-users making it a kind of early crowd-sourced standard. During the period where Freedb became unavailable, gnudb stepped in and is still going strong. Their home page has API acces information as well: [Wayback/Archive] gnudb.org an alternativ place for the free CD database to make sure it stays free.

Not vanished, but added was malware in the CDEX installers. According to CDex – Wikipedia, this was all versions starting at 1.76.

MP3Gain

MP3Gain is a tool to add audio normalisation information (shortened to gain) similar to ReplayGain to an MP3 file. This allows to have a bunch of audio files to be of similar perceived loudness. This is great for like virtual radiostations (which was one category the audio software I wrote for was used in) where it is often named “track gain” or even “radio gain”.

Track-gain is a bit confusing as there is also album-gain which is also a ReplayGain method, see track-gain and album-gain.

MP3Gain is quite smar