Click the "Select File" button above, and choose your CDA file.
You’ll see a preview, if available.
Click the "Convert file to..." button to extract text information.
Convert CDA to another file type
To convert CDA CD tracks to another format, you need Windows Media Player or other Audio software.
Convert a file to CDA
To convert other file formats to the "CD Audio Shortcut" file type, you need software like Windows Media Player or a similar tool.
About CDA files
Most .cda files are CD Audio Track Shortcuts generated by Microsoft Windows to index tracks on a standard Red Book Audio CD. These are internal RIFF format files that typically take up only 44 bytes and act solely as pointers to where an audio track starts and stops on the disc. A secondary, much rarer use is the HL7 CDA (Clinical Document Architecture), an XML-based file used in Polish clinical healthcare systems to store structured patient data. You can access audio .cda files with Windows Media Player or VLC, provided the original CD is still inserted in the disc drive. The biggest disadvantage of the audio .cda format is that it contains absolutely no audio data. A common real-world limitation is that users attempt to back up their music by dragging and dropping .cda files to their hard drive, only to discover later that the files are completely useless without the physical CD. To properly preserve the music, you must use software to 'rip' the CD and convert the referenced audio into mp3, wav, or flac files. Because .cda is merely a shortcut format pointing to external physical media, standard online audio converters completely fail to process them. We can inspect the file's underlying RIFF or XML structure to show you the internal content. If our analysis detects the XML-based clinical document, converting to pdf or reading the text is fully supported.
Convert.Guru analyzes your CDA file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
If you want to convert CDA file to MP3, WAV, MP4, M4A, AAC, FLAC, OGG, WMA, AIFF, OPUS, ALAC or APE, you can use Windows Media Player or similar software from the "Audio CD Track Indexing" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert MIDI, AAC, TTA, AU, WV, DTS, MID, FLAC, RA, MP3, PCM or WAV files to CDA, try Windows Media Player or another comparable tool in the "Audio CD Track Indexing" category.
The CDA Converter Story
The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our CDA converter.