Extract text from Android system trace files (CTRACE)
To convert CTRACE trace files to another format, you need Perfetto or other Developer software.
To convert other file formats to the "System Trace File" file type, you need software like Perfetto or a similar tool.
The .ctrace file is an Android system trace generated during performance profiling. Developers and engineers use these files to capture a detailed timeline of CPU scheduling, disk operations, and thread states on an Android device. The primary tools used to generate and analyze these trace logs are Perfetto and the legacy Android Systrace utility.
While essential for debugging frame drops and latency bottlenecks, the .ctrace format has significant drawbacks. It is a highly specialized, heavily structured format that cannot be natively read in standard text editors. Trace files often grow to hundreds of megabytes during long capture sessions, making them difficult to share or upload via standard email. Furthermore, viewing the timeline requires navigating to specific developer interfaces like the Perfetto web UI or typing chrome://tracing into Google Chrome.
For easier collaboration or programmatic analysis, you need to convert this file. For universal web-based sharing, convert to HTML. For custom data pipelines and log parsing, convert to JSON. For simple spreadsheet-based metric analysis, convert to CSV.
Convert.Guru analyzes your CTRACE file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
Users also converted TRACE and PFTRACE files.
If you want to convert CTRACE file to , you can use Perfetto or similar software from the "Android Performance Profiling" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert files to CTRACE, try Perfetto or another comparable tool in the "Android Performance Profiling" category.
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 CTRACE converter.