Common File Extensions

1 - .BIN; These are binary image files of CDs, usually accompanied by a .cue file that will be covered later in this guide. These can be manipulated by many different programs. My favorite way to handle these is to simply use a program like Alcohol 120% or Daemon Tools. Using these tools you can mount the images using ?Virtual? drives, which means you can use them as if they were CDs without burning it to a CD at all. Although the easiest and most popular way to handle these files is burning them onto a CD, I don't suggest burning the file directly. I would advise you to burn the .cue file, as it actually shrinks the size of the file when burnt, and is handled by popular burning software, such as Nero. If you for some reason haven't downloaded the .cue file for your .bin file you can download a utility called MakeCue (Thanks Joakim) which will generate a .cue fil for you. If you have downloaded a film in .bin format, a media player called Video LAN for Windows can play these files.

2 - .CUE; These little guys are typically very small in size, <1kB and simply provide applications with specs pertaining to how the file is laid out on disc. The files they provide this information for are the .bin files. Because they provide programs with how the image is to be laid out on disk, they tend to make the file small enough to fit onto a CD, which is why I say everyone should download the .cue file if they are downloading a .bin image. They can be burned by programs such as Nero or just about any other burning software. As well Alcohol 120% or Daemon Tools

3 - .ISO; Disk image files, can be mounted or burned using Nero, Alcohol 120% or Daemon Tools.

4 - .NRG; These are Nero image files, just burn them with Nero.

5 - .ZIP; These are compressed archives of files. Many times people will compress image files, to make transfers go faster, because the file size is smaller. Yes, windows XP does recognize these by default, but windows sucks at so many things. Popular extracting tools are WinAce, WinRAR, WinZip.

6 - .RAR; These are the same idea as ZIP files, and can be read by WinRAR and WinAce.

7 - .ACE; These are the same as ZIP adn RAR, use WinAce to extract these files. (Thanks SirXerxes)

8 - CloneCD Sub-section (Thanks SirXerxes and Idiot)

• .CCD - The CloneCD control file. It contains information about the logical structure of the CD. The CCD file is an ASCII text file. Experienced users may want to modify it.
• .IMG - Image, the main channel data of all tracks of the CD.
• .SUB - Sub Channel Data, the sub channel data of all tracks of the CD

9 - .NFO; Windows tries to open these files incorrectly by default, they can be viewed by choosing to open them in notepad/WordPad. They usually contain information about the file you have downloaded. These can also be viewed by a program called Damn NFO Viewer (Thanks Skyw4lker)

10 - .OGG audio and .OGM video files can be opened with a little help of OGGDS (Thanks killmaus)

11 - .APE can be opened via MonkeysAudio (Thanks killmaus)

12 - .MPC can be opened via MusePack (Thanks killmaus)

13 - .C2D; These are WinOnCD Image files created from Roxio Easy CD Creator. Use Roxio to burn these images.

If you did not found the file-extension you are looking for, go to this database: http://filext.com. It will tell you known formats to an entered file extention!