I recently started using Amazon Audible which, for anyone living under a rock which lack an internet connection, is an audio book streaming service run by our beloved book giant Amazon.
Their app works great, their download is fast and the selection… wuaw… so many books. You do have to pay $14.95 a month for this service and you only get one book a month. It feels like a lot compared to other streaming services like Netflix, which is a cornucopia of entertainment, but if you can’t spend too many hours each day listing to audio books this will properly be adequate for you.
But there was one thing i needed for this service to be better. The ability to download my books *cough*DRM FREE*cough*. So my first instinct was to extract the audio files from my Android phone. This happened to be pretty easy and for anyone interested the aax audio book files are located in:
/Android/data/com.audible.application/{some jumbled characters}.aax
But! there is an easier way to download your books. Simple go to https://www.audible.com/lib/
login and press download. Tadaa! You will now have an aax file of the audio book. But i was not quit in the clear… This audio format is not well supported and it is DRM locked. To do something about this i found some Github repos where people have tried to crack the DRM protection and convert the audio to M4B. After some tinkering i got it working and for future convenience i made a magic Python script which can find the checksum of the audio book, lookup it’s activation code in a rainbow table and convert it to a desired format. My script can be found on my Github here:
https://github.com/naueramant/Audiblex
An example run would look something like this:
Don’t worry about the “Referenced QT chapter track not found“, it’s just the converter which misses some information. The chapters are still converted correctly. Now, have fun converting!
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