CDXS Music System File Extractor (ISN)

June 5th, 2008 by Peter

CDXS is a music system used in various retail stores in Canada. The discs used in this player use a proprietary format to store MP3s on a DVD and are usually labelled “CDXS SYSTEM ONLY” on the DVD.

The format is trivial to decode, containing one large file with the “isn” extension on the DVD usually named output.isn, I have written a script in PHP to dump individual MP3s.

You can download the script here, it has been tested in PHP 5.1.6 but will probably work on newer versions. You are required to use the CLI (console) version of PHP to extract the files, assuming your DVD drive is your D: drive, and you have extracted PHP to C:\php, you would execute the following to extract the files to your current working directory:

C:\php\php -q isn_reader.php D:\output.isn

This script works on the discs that I have been provided with for testing purposes, I’m not really sure about any other discs. Your mileage may vary.