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Mp3 Extractor User Guide

Turn the CDs you own into a clean, fully labelled audio collection: titles, cover and lyrics found for you, five formats, one portable folder.

ExpSoft Mp3 Extractor v1.1.0.0 3 steps · about 5 minutes per albumComplexity: Easy Windows · CD drive · no GPU

What it is for

A shelf of audio CDs is music you already own, locked on discs. Turning it into files by hand means copying each track, typing every title, artist and year, hunting for the cover and naming everything consistently — album after album.

Mp3 Extractor does the whole job from one window: insert a disc, click Load Disc, and the album, artist, year, track titles and cover appear by themselves. Choose a format, click Rip, and every track lands in its own Artist - Album folder, fully tagged, with the cover embedded and, when they exist, synced lyrics.

The result is a clean, fully labelled audio collection: ready for your phone or your player, and a solid base for an audio dataset later — built only from discs you own and have the right to use.

Before you start

  • Windows, 64-bit, with the free .NET 8 Desktop Runtime. If it is missing, Windows offers to download it the first time you start the app.
  • An audio CD drive, internal or USB.
  • An internet connection for the one-time installation and for the album lookups. No account, no key, no subscription, no GPU.
  • No installer: unzip the release into a folder of your choice and run ExpSoft_Mp3_Extractor.exe. Once installed, the folder weighs about 600 MB and holds everything; you can move it, even to a USB stick.
Your discs, your responsibility. Most commercial audio CDs contain copyrighted recordings, and copying them — even for personal use — is regulated differently in every country. Use Mp3 Extractor only for discs you legally own, where your local law allows private copies, and do not redistribute the files. The app reads standard audio CDs only and does not bypass any copy protection. The same notice is on the WELCOME tab.

The WELCOME tab

Mp3 Extractor WELCOME tab with the version card, the quick start and the tips
The WELCOME tab: what the app does, a three-step quick start and practical tips.
  1. 1
    Version — the installed version; it says when a newer one is available (click it to see the other ExpSoft tools).
  2. 2
    Quick Start — the three tabs to use, in order: SETUP, SETTINGS, RUN.
  3. 3
    Tipnotes — clean the disc, choose the format, Fast or Accurate, unknown discs, moving the folder, lyrics.

Further down, the tab shows the legal notice, the licences of every component and the online services used.

Step 1

Install once (SETUP tab)

Mp3 Extractor SETUP tab with the Check Prerequisites and Install All buttons, the four installation steps and the installation log
The SETUP tab. This install had been moved to another folder: the check repaired it before testing it.
  1. 1
    Check Prerequisites — looks at the four parts of the install and really starts its Python. If the folder was moved, it repairs the install first.
  2. 2
    Install All — downloads what is missing into the app's own folder: uv, Python 3.12, the Python packages and FFmpeg (full build, the one that reads audio CDs). Finished steps are skipped.
  3. 3
    The four steps — a green tick for each part that is ready.
  4. 4
    Installation log — every action, with the time. Here, the lines tagged [portability] show the repair of a moved install.

Click Check Prerequisites, then Install All, and wait until the four steps are green. It is done once: nothing is installed anywhere else on the PC.

Step 2

Load the disc (RUN tab)

  1. Insert the audio CD. Clean it first if it has fingerprints: they cause more failed reads than scratches.
  2. Choose the drive 1 — Refresh scans again, for example after plugging in a USB drive — and click Load Disc 2.
  3. A few seconds later, the album appears: cover, artist, album, year and every track with its title and duration.
Mp3 Extractor RUN tab after Load Disc: album cover, artist, album and year, the 16 tracks with their durations, the encoding and output settings, and the log
A disc loaded: identified in about three seconds, 16 tracks.
  1. 1
    CD Drive · Refresh — the optical drives of this PC.
  2. 2
    Load Disc — reads the disc, then looks up the album online.
  3. 3
    Album — cover, artist, album, year and the disc's identifier.
  4. 4
    All · None — tick or untick every track.
  5. 5
    Tracks — tick the ones to rip. The Status column follows each track during the rip.
  6. 6
    Encoding — format, quality, rip mode, lyrics and cover — see Step 3.
  7. 7
    Output Directory — each album gets its own Artist - Album folder in here. … chooses it, Open shows it in Windows Explorer.
  8. 8
    Rip Selected Tracks — starts the rip.
  9. 9
    Log — each action, with the time.
Unknown disc? A home-burned CD, or a disc nobody has catalogued, is not found online: the tracks are named Track 01, Track 02… and the artist Unknown Artist. You can still rip it and fix the names later.
Step 3

Choose the format and rip

Pick the Format; the quality box and its label follow it:

Mp3 Extractor Encoding panel with FLAC selected and its compression level set to 5
FLAC selected: the quality box becomes a compression level, 5 by default.
  1. 1
    Format — mp3, flac, wav, ogg or m4a.
  2. 2
    Quality — bitrate, level or quality, depending on the format.
FormatQualityBest for
mp3320, 256, 192, 128 kbps, or V0 / V2 (variable)phones and every player
flaccompression level 0 to 12, 5 by default — the sound is the same at every levelan exact, lossless copy of the CD, about half the size of WAV
wavuncompressedaudio editing; WAV files carry no tags
oggq4 to q10, or a bitratesmall files
m4a128 to 320 kbpsthe Apple ecosystem
  1. Rip Mode: fast for healthy discs; accurate re-reads and corrects read errors, for scratched or old discs — slower.
  2. Keep Fetch lyrics and Save cover art ticked to get them.
  3. Tick the tracks you want and click Rip Selected Tracks.
Mp3 Extractor during a rip: one track marked Ripping, the Cancel button, the progress bar and the log
During the rip.
  1. 1
    Status — Ripping…, then Done or Failed, track by track.
  2. 2
    Cancel — stops the rip in progress.
  3. 3
    Progress — moves while the app works.
  4. 4
    Log — the track being ripped, the lyrics lookup, then a summary.
Mp3 Extractor after the rip: three tracks marked Done and the log ending with RIP COMPLETE
Done: 3 tracks, 8 minutes of music, ripped in about one minute in fast mode on our USB drive.
  1. 1
    Done — each ticked track is finished.
  2. 2
    Summary — how many succeeded and where the files are.
  3. 3
    Open — shows the album folder in Windows Explorer.
Lyrics are best-effort. Synced lyrics come from a free public catalogue; many tracks — instrumentals, compilations, rare albums — have none. That is normal, and never makes the rip fail.

What you get

The album folder written by Mp3 Extractor: MP3 files, one FLAC file and cover.jpg, with the tags of one file
The folder of this test: three tracks in MP3, one again in FLAC, the cover, and the tags written in one of the files.
  • One folder per album: output\Artist - Album\.
  • One file per track, named 05 - Title.mp3, tagged with title, artist, album, year, track number and album artist — on a compilation, each track keeps its own artist.
  • The cover, embedded in every file (except WAV) and saved as cover.jpg.
  • When they exist, synced lyrics in a lyrics sub-folder, one .lrc file per track.

The SETTINGS tab

Mp3 Extractor SETTINGS tab with the default output folder, format, quality and mode, three check boxes and Save Settings
The defaults the RUN tab starts with.
  1. 1
    Default output directory — where the album folders go; empty means the output folder of the app.
  2. 2
    Default format · quality · mode — what the RUN tab selects when the app starts.
  3. 3
    Check boxes — fetch lyrics, save the cover, and check for a newer version at startup (off: no check).
  4. 4
    Save Settings — writes these defaults to config.json, next to the app.

Operations

To…Do this
Install the toolsSETUP → Check Prerequisites, then Install All
Read a discRUN → choose the drive → Load Disc
Rip only some tracksNone, then tick the tracks you want
Get a lossless copyFormat flac
Rescue a scratched discclean it, then Rip Mode accurate
Find the filesOpen next to the output folder
Move the appmove the whole folder, then SETUP → Check Prerequisites
Change the defaultsSETTINGS → Save Settings

Files the app writes

Everything stays inside the app's folder: runtime\ and python_env\ (the tools installed by SETUP), output\ (your albums, unless you chose another folder), cache\, logs\ (one log per installation and per session) and config.json. The MORE TOOLS ? tab keeps its browser data in ExpSoft_Mp3_Extractor.exe.WebView2. Nothing is written elsewhere on the PC.

Troubleshooting

The app does not start.

Install the free .NET 8 Desktop Runtime from Microsoft — Windows offers the link the first time — then start the app again.

I moved the folder (or plugged the USB stick into another PC).

Open SETUP and click Check Prerequisites: the app repairs its install for the new place. Loading a disc does the same on its own.

My drive is not in the list.

Plug it in, wait for Windows to see it, then click Refresh.

The tracks are called Track 01, Track 02…

The disc was not found online (home-burned or uncatalogued). The rip still works; rename the files afterwards.

A track failed.

Clean the disc from the centre outwards and rip that track again in accurate mode.

The rip stopped on its own.

The app stops a rip when the PC has less than 2 GB of free memory left, to protect your other programs. Close a few applications and start again.

No lyrics were saved.

None exist for those tracks in the public catalogue. This is normal, especially for instrumentals and compilations.