Convert vintage sampler CD-ROM images into uncompressed .wav files you can use anywhere. No proprietary disk-mounting software, no dead commercial tools, no dependencies beyond the Python standard library.
The point is to get these sounds out of the hardware they were trapped in — not into a different sampler's format. You get plain WAV: drag it into any DAW, load it in whatever sampler you already own, keep it for the next twenty years.
Thousands of 1990s sample libraries survive only as disc images built for hardware samplers — AKAI S1000/S3000, E-mu, Roland, Ensoniq. They are not ISO 9660: the sampler wrote its own filesystem straight onto the disc, so a modern computer mounts nothing and shows you an unreadable volume. samplerdisc reads those filesystems directly out of the image file and writes the samples back out as plain PCM WAV.
Python 3.11 or newer. No other dependencies — the whole tool is standard library.
uv tool install git+https://github.com/bmxcode/samplerdiscOr with pip:
pip install git+https://github.com/bmxcode/samplerdiscsamplerdisc list "Black II Black.bin" # volumes and samples, without extracting
samplerdisc extract "Sound Library 1.mdx" ./out # every sample to WAV
samplerdisc batch ./discs ./out --manifest out/manifest.json
samplerdisc export-iso "Sound Library 1.mdx" ./library1.isoYou get one directory per disc, one per volume inside it:
out/AKAI.S3000.Sound.Library.1/
3001 G.PF 2/
PF BD 2F 0-L.wav mono, exactly as stored
PF BD 2F 0-R.wav
stereo/
PF BD 2F 0.wav the -L/-R pair, rejoined
original/ only with --keep-originals
B-GRAND PF.s3p the program file, untouched
PF BD 2F 0-L.s3s
Extraction writes one WAV per sample, grouped by volume. Where a disc stores stereo as split mono files — the AKAI -L / -R convention — you also get a joined stereo WAV, and the mono originals are kept alongside it rather than replaced.
The audio is a byte-for-byte copy: AKAI stores signed 16-bit little-endian PCM and so does WAV, so there is no resampling, no bit-depth change and no dithering anywhere in the process. Loop points, root key and tuning from the disc are written into the WAV's standard smpl chunk, so a DAW that understands them picks them up and one that doesn't sees an ordinary WAV.
--keep-originals additionally writes each sample and program out byte-for-byte as the sampler stored it, into an original/ folder beside the WAVs. Two reasons to want it: programs hold the key ranges and envelopes, which a WAV cannot carry and which are otherwise left on the disc; and the files are named by the generation that wrote them — .s3p/.s3s for an S3000 disc, .s1p/.s1s for an S1000 — which is the shape ConvertWithMoss wants for turning programs into a playable instrument.
batch walks a directory of images and writes a JSON manifest of the run — what each disc contained, which samples were skipped and why. A disc that fails never stops the run, because a real collection has duds in it.
export-iso unwraps any supported container into a flat ISO without touching the filesystem inside. That is the escape hatch for a disc whose filesystem samplerdisc cannot yet read: the ISO can be handed to akaiutil or any other tool.
Containers — .mdx (DAEMON Tools, including compressed), .nrg (Nero v1 and v2), .bin + .cue (raw 2352-byte CD sectors), .iso / .img, .cdr, .tao. Detection is by content signature, not by file extension, because these archives are named inconsistently.
Audio CDs — some of these discs are plain Red Book audio, not CD-ROMs. samplerdisc recognises them from the cue sheet and writes each track out as a stereo WAV, keeping the track titles (which usually carry the tempo). No filesystem is involved; the sectors already are the audio.
Filesystems — AKAI S1000/S3000 family, E-mu EMU3 (EIIIX, ESI-32/4000, Emulator IV), Roland S770 MR25A (S-770, S-750, S-760), and plain ISO 9660 for discs whose payload is already WAV or AIFF.
Audio payloads — a WAV inside an ISO 9660 disc is copied out untouched. An AIFF is carried to WAV: its samples are big-endian and a WAV's are little-endian, so the bytes within each value are reversed and the values are left alone. Root key, tuning and loop points come across from the AIFF's INST and MARK chunks into the WAV's smpl.
Compressed .mdx is the piece no other open-source tool reads today. The format is documented byte by byte in docs/formats/mdx.md, along with .nrg, raw CD sectors, the AKAI, E-mu and Roland S-7xx filesystems, and audio CDs.
79 disc images from two archive.org collections — retro-sample-cds and archive-oldschoolscds. Fifty-two flat .iso/.bin, seventeen compressed .mdx, five raw CD images, two .nrg, one .mds/.mdf pair, two audio CDs.
| Discs converted | 69 of 79 |
| Samples | 47 742 |
| Stereo pairs rejoined | 4 422 |
| Audio CD tracks | 161 |
| Entries skipped (damage) | 20 |
| Time | 31 s |
Every extracted WAV was checked against the bytes on the disc it came from — all 22 320 are byte-identical, none unreadable, none zero-length. Ten are silent for their whole length and are meant to be: they are named Dead Air, on a Proteus library that ships silence as a sample.
Sample rates run from 6 000 to 48 000 Hz across 908 distinct values. The odd ones are real — E-mu writes rates like 24 444 and 27 778, and AKAI uses 33 075 (¾ of 44 100) and 29 400 (⅔) to trade bandwidth for memory. They are carried through exactly as the disc states them and never rounded.
The ten that do not convert are accounted for: one S-550 disc present as both .iso and .nrg — a different format from the S-7xx and not yet read (ADR-0014) — two Digidesign SampleCell discs, one audio CD with no cue sheet present as both .mdx and .cdr, three Emulator IV discs that list their banks but do not extract them, and one ISO 9660 disc holding E-mu .EBL banks rather than audio.
Every WAV was checked against the disc it came from — 67 of 67 discs match exactly, comparing multisets of SHA-256 over the PCM per disc rather than going via filenames, so duplicate names cannot mask a mismatch and no path is guessed. 40 244 payloads, zero mismatches.
The five Roland S-7xx discs contribute 6 392 samples and 1 341 stereo pairs, with nothing skipped.
A third collection, 29 discs, added after the two above and measured separately. Sixteen are AKAI and thirteen are ISO 9660 discs holding plain audio.
| Discs converted | 29 of 29 |
| Samples | 21 435 |
| Stereo pairs rejoined | 4 930 |
| WAV files written | 26 365 |
| Duplicate AIFF suppressed | 5 719 |
| Entries skipped (damage) | 0 |
Every one of the 26 365 files written back reads as a valid WAV with audio in it. The single entry not written that was not a duplicate is a stereo pair on vol.20 whose two halves declare different rates — 44 033 against 44 100 — so the joiner refuses to fuse them and both mono halves are written instead.
The thirteen ISO 9660 discs ship each sound twice, once as AIFF and once as WAV. 6 033 of the 7 498 AIFF hold audio that is already coming out as a WAV, and those are written once; the other 1 779 are converted, along with 314 whose AIFF carries a root key or a loop that its WAV twin does not. vol.43 is the reason the check is on the audio and not the filename: its 1 386 AIFF all share a name with a WAV and none of them share its audio, being mastered a few frames longer (ADR-0024).
These discs are also the only place in this project where the correct output is known independently. Where a sound exists as both, the publisher's own WAV says what the AIFF conversion should produce — including the loop convention the AIFF spec leaves open, settled on 195 pairs out of 195.
- Roland S-550, Ensoniq and Kurzweil filesystems.
Roland LCD1.isoopens* ROLAND S-550 *, which shares nothing with the S-7xx format (ADR-0014); neither archive holds a second specimen to check a backend against. The container layer opens all of these, soexport-isogets you the sectors meanwhile. Each backend is a self-contained module (ADR-0003), so adding one touches nothing else. - Roland S-7xx discs come out as one flat volume. The disc groups its samples through a volume → performance → patch → partial chain, and two of those four record formats are undecoded, so every sample is listed under the disc's own label instead. The four-character prefix in each name is the grouping you get (ADR-0016).
- Roland S-7xx sample rates are written as 44 100, not read from the disc. No rate field has been found, and pitch cannot settle 44 100 against 22 050 because they differ by exactly an octave. Every disc measured is 44 100; a 22.05 kHz one would come out an octave high (ADR-0018).
- Emulator IV bank interiors. E-IV discs list their folders and banks correctly — the directory is shared with EIIIX and ESI — but the inside of a bank is a different layout with only one specimen to hand, so those banks are listed and not extracted (ADR-0015).
- A
.mds/.mdfpair is read, but its descriptor is not parsed. One pair has now been through it end to end, and it reads the.mdfand sniffs its geometry rather than parsing the.mds— correct for a single-track data disc, which is what these are. A multi-track or offset image would be read from byte 0 and come out wrong; the track table is unread. Please open an issue if you have such a disc. CUESchunks in NRG are not parsed; onlyCUEX. No disc using the older form was to hand to check the layout against.- An audio CD with no cue sheet cannot be split into tracks.
samplerdisc infotells you when a disc's content looks like Red Book audio, andextract --assume-audio-cdwrites the whole stream as one WAV, but the track boundaries live in a cue, not in the bytes. - AIFF-C, and 8-bit AIFF, are refused rather than read. AIFF-C may be compressed, and compressed data written out as PCM plays as noise while reporting nothing wrong. 8-bit AIFF is signed where 8-bit WAV is unsigned, so carrying it would change every sample value rather than reorder its bytes — which is the one thing this tool does not do (ADR-0024).
- EXS24 and HALion instruments are kept, not read.
--keep-originalswrites the.exsand.fxpfiles out byte for byte; turning them into a playable instrument is ConvertWithMoss's job. - AKAI S900, floppy images and the DD partition. Use akaiutil.
Run samplerdisc info on it and open an issue with the output:
samplerdisc info "Some Disc.mdx"no recognised filesystem means the container was understood and the filesystem inside it was not — usually a manufacturer with no backend yet, which is the useful case to hear about. Please don't attach the disc image; the info output plus the library name is enough to start.
Converting a .bin to a .iso does not make an AKAI disc mountable. These discs are not ISO 9660 — there is no volume descriptor and your OS will still refuse them. What the conversion does is hand the sectors to a tool that understands the AKAI filesystem. That is what export-iso is for, and it works on .mdx and .nrg too, which bin2iso cannot open at all.
Some sample-CD collections mix genuine AKAI discs with libraries that were converted to Kontakt and burned back to .bin. Those second ones are ISO 9660 and do mount normally. samplerdisc info tells you which kind you have.
ConvertWithMoss (Jürgen Moßgraber, Java, LGPL-3.0) reads Akai S1000/S3000 ISO images, .S3P programs, MPC keygroups, NKI, SFZ and SoundFont 2, and converts them to SFZ, DecentSampler, Bitwig, MPC/Force, EXS and more. If you want a disc turned into a playable multisample instrument rather than plain WAVs, that is its job and it is excellent at it — use it instead of this. It does not open containers, so run samplerdisc export-iso first and point it at the result.
akaiutil (Klaus Michael Indlekofer) is the long-standing open-source reader for AKAI sampler filesystems, covering variants this project does not — S900, floppy geometries, the DD partition. vintage-samplerCD-extractor wraps it for macOS and Linux. akaiutil is the correctness oracle this project tests itself against.
samplerdisc exists for the layer underneath both: compressed .mdx, .nrg and raw .bin are containers neither tool opens, and that is where people get stuck.
Unrelated despite the name: mdxtools handles X68000 MDX chiptune music files, not disc images.
docs/README.md is the reading order for the codebase. The format documentation in docs/formats/ is the expensive part of this project — layouts established from hex dumps, with constants verified against named discs — and it is worth reading before changing a parser.
uv run ruff check . && uv run ruff format --check . && uv run pytest -qTest fixtures are synthetic and built in code. Disc images are never committed (ADR-0008); tests that need a real disc read SAMPLERDISC_TEST_DISCS and skip when it is unset.
CHANGELOG.md records what changed between releases and why.
This tool ships no sample data. It converts discs you already own, and the sample libraries on them remain the property of their publishers. Nothing in this repository contains audio, disc images, or any part of a commercial library.
MIT — see LICENSE.