Why nothing can convert your .cda file
They copied files off an audio CD, got .cda files, and every converter they try either fails or produces silence. They think their files are corrupt. They are not — the files never contained audio in the first place.
A .cda file is not audio. It is a 44-byte shortcut that Windows shows for each track on an audio CD, holding a track number and a start position on the disc and nothing else. That is why every converter you have tried has refused it, and why the one that appeared to work gave you silence. The music is on the disc itself, written as raw sectors with no files over them, so the only way to get an MP3 is to rip the CD with a program that talks to the drive: Windows Media Player Legacy, VLC, the Music app on a Mac, or Exact Audio Copy. Rip to WAV or FLAC first, convert afterwards. Your files are not corrupt. They never contained any audio to corrupt.
What is actually inside a .cda file
Put an audio CD in a drive and open it in Explorer. You get Track01.cda, Track02.cda and so on, each one 44 bytes, each one rounded up to "1 KB" in the size column. That uniformity is the tell: a 42-second interlude and a 12-minute prog epic produce files of exactly the same size, because neither file contains the track.
Inside those 44 bytes is a small RIFF header and a CDDA chunk carrying the track number, a disc identifier, the offset where the track starts and its length in frames — a frame being one seventy-fifth of a second. Windows' CD filesystem driver invents these entries on the fly. They are not stored on the disc. They exist so Explorer has something to draw an icon next to.
This is why double-clicking one works while the disc is in the drive and fails the moment it is not. Copy the .cda files to your desktop, eject the disc and put it back in its case, and you are left with a folder of library tickets for a book somebody else has taken home.
Why no converter can open one, including ours
An audio CD follows the Red Book standard, published in 1980, and it has no filesystem. The audio is 16-bit PCM at 44,100 Hz in stereo, laid down in 2,352-byte sectors at 75 sectors per second: 176,400 bytes every second, or 1,411 kbps. That is the same arithmetic as a CD-standard WAV, because a WAV rip is exactly that data written into a header.
Reading those sectors takes a command sent to the optical drive. It is not a file operation, and a converter that works on files has nothing to work with. Ours is honest about it in the least helpful way possible: FFmpeg opens the 44 bytes, finds no audio stream, and stops. No web page can reach past a file picker to issue a raw read to a drive, so no browser-based tool, this one included, will ever handle a .cda. Ripping is desktop software's job.
The sites that accept the file anyway are doing nothing cleverer. They either fail a moment later, or hand back something the length of a jingle that plays as silence — the 44 bytes read as though they were sound. A suspiciously tiny result from a CD track is always that.
Select all the files you copied off the disc and look at the total. Twelve tracks of real music would be several hundred megabytes. If the folder adds up to well under a kilobyte, you have copied the pointers and left the album behind.
How to rip the CD properly
All four routes produce real audio files. Pick on how much the disc matters to you.
Windows Media Player Legacy
Still installed on Windows 11 — press Start and type Windows Media Player Legacy. Recent builds of the newer Media Player app rip discs too, and the steps are close enough to follow either way.
- Insert the disc. It appears in the left-hand pane with its track list.
- Open Rip settings ▸ Format and choose. MP3, WAV (Lossless), FLAC, ALAC and the WMA variants are all there.
- Under Rip settings ▸ Audio Quality, pick the bitrate if you chose a lossy format.
- Rip settings ▸ More options ▸ Rip Music sets the destination. It defaults to
Music\Artist\Album. - Click Rip CD.
Track and album names come from an online lookup. Offline, or with a disc the database has never seen, you get Unknown Album and Track 1 onwards, and renaming twelve files by hand afterwards is worse than fixing it first.
VLC, on any operating system
Media ▸ Convert / Save ▸ Disc tab ▸ Audio CD, set the starting track, choose a profile, then Convert. VLC does one track per pass and names its output after nothing in particular: a fine way to rescue a track or two, a tedious way to do an album. It also makes no attempt at error correction.
macOS Music app
No Mac has shipped with an optical drive in over a decade, so this assumes a USB one. Insert the disc and the Music app offers to import it. Before accepting, open Music ▸ Settings ▸ Files ▸ Import Settings and set Import Using to Apple Lossless, WAV or the MP3 encoder. Tick Use error correction when reading Audio CDs in the same dialog; it costs nothing but time.
A disc you actually care about
Exact Audio Copy is free on Windows and re-reads doubtful sectors until two passes agree, then checks the finished rip against AccurateRip, a database of checksums from other people's rips of the same pressing. A green tick there means your copy matches other copies of that exact disc, sample for sample. XLD does the same job on macOS, cdparanoia or whipper on Linux. A secure rip of a scratched album can take an hour; on a clean disc it is barely slower than an ordinary rip.
If the machine has no drive at all there is no software answer. A USB optical drive is cheap, and a phone cannot do this under any circumstances.
Which format to rip to, and at what quality
Rip to a lossless format if you have the space. FLAC and ALAC store every sample from the disc and compress it about as far as a ZIP would, so the rip is an exact copy of the audio and the disc goes back on the shelf for good. Encode MP3s from that whenever you need them.
| Rip format | One 4-minute track | A 74-minute album | Exact copy of the disc? |
|---|---|---|---|
| WAV, 16-bit 44.1 kHz | 40.4 MB | About 747 MB | Yes |
| FLAC | 20 to 25 MB | 400 to 450 MB | Yes |
| ALAC (Apple Lossless) | 20 to 26 MB | 410 to 460 MB | Yes |
| MP3, 320 kbps | 9.2 MB | 169 MB | No |
| MP3, 192 kbps | 5.5 MB | 102 MB | No |
| MP3, 128 kbps | 3.7 MB | 68 MB | No |
FLAC over WAV where the software offers both: the same audio at roughly half the size, with tags that players actually read, where WAV's tagging is patchy and widely ignored. The arithmetic behind those sizes is set out in full elsewhere.
Ripping straight to MP3 and skipping the archive step, 192 kbps is the sensible floor and 320 is the format's ceiling rather than a step up to something better: the difference between the two is smaller than the file sizes suggest.
The reason to keep a lossless rip is that every lossy encode starts from it rather than from another lossy file. A phone copy at 128 kbps, a car copy at 192 and a laptop copy at 256 all come off the same master. Encoding MP3s from MP3s stacks the damage instead.
Turning the rip into MP3s
Once the files are on the disk they are ordinary audio and everything behaves normally again. Drop them into the converter on this site and pick MP3; the whole album can go in at once, and nothing leaves your machine, which is worth knowing if the rip lives on a work laptop. The FLAC to MP3 tool is the same engine with the defaults already set for a folder of album tracks.
Let the ripper name the files first. Ripping software is where the artist, album and track tags come from, and correcting those afterwards file by file is the part everybody regrets skipping.
The commonest destination for a fresh rip is still a car, and older head units are fussy: many read MP3 from a USB stick and refuse everything else on it, which is worth checking before you copy an album across.
When the rip keeps failing
A disc that reads for half a minute and then stalls has a physical problem, not a software one.
- Clean it properly. A soft dry cloth, wiped from the centre straight out to the edge. Circular wipes follow the track and turn one scratch into a run of unreadable frames.
- Try a different drive. Drives differ enormously in how hard they try. A cheap external USB drive frequently reads a disc that a slot-loading laptop drive gave up on, and occasionally the reverse.
- Slow it down. Exact Audio Copy and dBpoweramp can cap the read speed. At 4× a drive has far more time to re-read a marginal sector than at 40×.
- Rip the bad track on its own. One unreadable frame is a seventy-fifth of a second. Secure rippers interpolate across it and report exactly where they did, which beats abandoning the album.
- Hold the disc up to a light. Pinholes in the reflective layer mean the aluminium has oxidised, a common fate for pressings from the late 1980s. No ripper recovers data that is no longer there.
- Home-burned CD-Rs age badly. The dye layer degrades with heat and light, so a disc burned in 2004 may read only in patches. Rip those before the rest of the shelf.
One case worth naming: albums sold between roughly 2001 and 2006 sometimes carried deliberate anti-ripping measures. Those pressings are not standard audio CDs, some drives refuse them outright, and nothing here changes that.
The converter on the home page handles this. Free, no upload, no sign-up.