Remove DRM from Audible's audio books (Removing copy-protection from .AA files)

[stranzenbach]

I'm using Ubuntu 10.04 with wine.
Following the above procedure, goldwave does not recognise .aa files.
Is there any body with luck using linux?

[Loyalise]

Thank you so much! The toolkit was still available (June of 2012) and everything worked great! I was already a dedicated GoldWave user, but didn't have the ability to open AA files until I downloaded the older Audible Manager version. I am converting an AA file to MP3 as I type.

Thanks again!

[bkw]

http://swankandswill.blogspot.com/20...thout-drm.html

Setup is a little complicated but that's one-time. It's far faster and easier than anything else after that. And ridiculously ludicrously faster.
Some Audible drm strippers brag about running at 5x. 5x? A 36 hour book will only take 7.2 hours to convert? Wow where is my seat belt!!!? Try 400x ! Not 400%, 400X! A 36 hour book takes 0.09 hours, 5.4 minutes. That's with a good cpu. With a lowly Atom it only gets a paltry *90x*. What were you saying about 5x? hehe

Best thing is the crucial DRM-stripping part is Audibles OWN software. The directshow filter library/plugin.

The crucial speed-making part is the Helix mp3 encoder.

And dbpoweramp is just a super flexible and handy glue connecting those two together. Neither Helix nor dbpoweramp are doing any DRM stripping.

And unlike the kludges that use the cd-burning option in the desktop player, or sound-card loopbacks, or virtual sound cards, Audible can not legally claim that using the directshow filter in this way violates the intended purpose. They can claim that using the cd-burner option for any other purpose than to play a real cd, for instance burning to a fake software cd and then ripping it, or similarly using a fake virtual sound card that records instead of plays, violates the advertised purpose of the software.

But the directshow filter is by definition just a filter, a plugin, whose interface is the directshow api. No one made them make that software. If they didn't want people to have access to a generic, application-agnostic library plugin, they should not have produced and then distributed one.

All they can really do is stop distributing it themselves, and stop advertizing that it exists, and try to pretend it never did exist, and introduce new audio formats that the old filter will not know how to play. And they have done all of that. But, it really did exist and it still does.

--
bkw

[jacktheripper]

If I understand this correctly, this (Sound Taxi and similar) not only strips DRM from audiobooks (like DeDRM plugin in ebooks) but it must re-encode the stuff (with a degrade in sound quality) unless I choose to save it in WAV or FLAC. Correct?

Anyways, say if I had a DRM-free AA or AAX file, what are they? What codecs they use and what Windows desktop player plays them natively?

[tony123]

I followed the procedure by toXiclabs dated 10/12/2011 in this thread on Windows 8.1 64-bit computer (March 2014). Worked great! Was able to convert a 2-hour Audible audiobook into MP3 format in about 22 minutes. All other tools, purchased or free, do the conversion in real time, meaning the conversion takes as long as the audiobook playing length is!!!

Thanks a million!

[Lexie]

Been using the Goldwave method for years and still works like a charm on win7 64bit. But I have yet to cone across a way to convert the new audible format, aax i think it's called. Anyone know how?
Toolkit links still works btw

[Torquemurder]

I put together a free tool to automate the .aa to mp3 / wav process. I call it inAudible and you can find it here.

Besides installing the Audible Manager (which all Audible users should have, anyway) it shouldn't require any additional codecs or libraries.

Features:

• Includes and installs required codecs and DLLs
• Includes LAME and will auto-encode if desired
• Allows for multiple input files and a single file destination mask
• Will split the encoded file into smaller, more managable files using silence detection to find chapter breaks

I have tested it on XP, Win7 x64 and Win 8.1. Seems to work, although 8.1 needed a reboot.

[Torquemurder]

As far as speed goes, I just tested it on a 2.2ghz i7. It took 10 minutes to decrypt, split and re-encode a 23 hour audiobook. 138x speed-up isn't bad.

[2014-03-26 12:39:02 PM] - building graph...
[2014-03-26 12:39:03 PM] - running...
[2014-03-26 12:39:03 PM] - Decrypting Audible file...
.................................................. ..............................
[2014-03-26 12:39:45 PM] - Decrypted 1,164,505,006 raw bytes.
[2014-03-26 12:39:45 PM] - Splitting...
[2014-03-26 12:40:19 PM] - Split into 5 pieces.
[2014-03-26 12:40:19 PM] - 1 / 5
[2014-03-26 12:40:21 PM] - Encoding MP3...
[2014-03-26 12:41:01 PM] - Compressed MP3 down to 43,799,177 bytes.
[2014-03-26 12:41:01 PM] - 2 / 5
[2014-03-26 12:41:02 PM] - Encoding MP3...
[2014-03-26 12:41:25 PM] - Compressed MP3 down to 25,043,327 bytes.
[2014-03-26 12:41:26 PM] - 3 / 5
[2014-03-26 12:41:26 PM] - Encoding MP3...
[2014-03-26 12:41:41 PM] - Compressed MP3 down to 15,359,272 bytes.
[2014-03-26 12:41:41 PM] - 4 / 5
[2014-03-26 12:41:43 PM] - Encoding MP3...
[2014-03-26 12:42:31 PM] - Compressed MP3 down to 50,711,298 bytes.
[2014-03-26 12:42:31 PM] - 5 / 5
[2014-03-26 12:42:31 PM] - Encoding MP3...
[2014-03-26 12:42:38 PM] - Compressed MP3 down to 7,264,347 bytes.
[2014-03-26 12:42:38 PM] - building graph...
[2014-03-26 12:42:38 PM] - running...
[2014-03-26 12:42:38 PM] - Decrypting Audible file...
.................................................. .........................................
[2014-03-26 12:43:25 PM] - Decrypted 1,238,249,134 raw bytes.
[2014-03-26 12:43:25 PM] - Splitting...
[2014-03-26 12:44:01 PM] - Split into 6 pieces.
[2014-03-26 12:44:01 PM] - 1 / 6
[2014-03-26 12:44:01 PM] - Encoding MP3...
[2014-03-26 12:44:01 PM] - Compressed MP3 down to 58,280 bytes.
[2014-03-26 12:44:01 PM] - 2 / 6
[2014-03-26 12:44:03 PM] - Encoding MP3...
[2014-03-26 12:44:49 PM] - Compressed MP3 down to 49,623,262 bytes.
[2014-03-26 12:44:49 PM] - 3 / 6
[2014-03-26 12:44:50 PM] - Encoding MP3...
[2014-03-26 12:45:11 PM] - Compressed MP3 down to 22,450,734 bytes.
[2014-03-26 12:45:11 PM] - 4 / 6
[2014-03-26 12:45:12 PM] - Encoding MP3...
[2014-03-26 12:45:32 PM] - Compressed MP3 down to 21,026,237 bytes.
[2014-03-26 12:45:32 PM] - 5 / 6
[2014-03-26 12:45:34 PM] - Encoding MP3...
[2014-03-26 12:46:14 PM] - Compressed MP3 down to 42,977,595 bytes.
[2014-03-26 12:46:14 PM] - 6 / 6
[2014-03-26 12:46:15 PM] - Encoding MP3...
[2014-03-26 12:46:29 PM] - Compressed MP3 down to 14,721,342 bytes.
[2014-03-26 12:46:29 PM] - building graph...
[2014-03-26 12:46:29 PM] - running...
[2014-03-26 12:46:29 PM] - Decrypting Audible file...
.................................................. .............................
[2014-03-26 12:47:10 PM] - Decrypted 1,129,268,782 raw bytes.
[2014-03-26 12:47:10 PM] - Splitting...
[2014-03-26 12:47:42 PM] - Split into 10 pieces.
[2014-03-26 12:47:42 PM] - 1 / 10
[2014-03-26 12:47:42 PM] - Encoding MP3...
[2014-03-26 12:47:42 PM] - Compressed MP3 down to 58,280 bytes.
[2014-03-26 12:47:42 PM] - 2 / 10
[2014-03-26 12:47:43 PM] - Encoding MP3...
[2014-03-26 12:47:59 PM] - Compressed MP3 down to 16,321,048 bytes.
[2014-03-26 12:47:59 PM] - 3 / 10
[2014-03-26 12:47:59 PM] - Encoding MP3...
[2014-03-26 12:48:11 PM] - Compressed MP3 down to 12,098,948 bytes.
[2014-03-26 12:48:11 PM] - 4 / 10
[2014-03-26 12:48:13 PM] - Encoding MP3...
[2014-03-26 12:49:02 PM] - Compressed MP3 down to 53,118,574 bytes.
[2014-03-26 12:49:02 PM] - 5 / 10
[2014-03-26 12:49:03 PM] - Encoding MP3...
[2014-03-26 12:49:14 PM] - Compressed MP3 down to 11,260,129 bytes.
[2014-03-26 12:49:14 PM] - 6 / 10
[2014-03-26 12:49:14 PM] - Encoding MP3...
[2014-03-26 12:49:21 PM] - Compressed MP3 down to 7,407,351 bytes.
[2014-03-26 12:49:21 PM] - 7 / 10
[2014-03-26 12:49:21 PM] - Encoding MP3...
[2014-03-26 12:49:30 PM] - Compressed MP3 down to 9,560,259 bytes.
[2014-03-26 12:49:30 PM] - 8 / 10
[2014-03-26 12:49:31 PM] - Encoding MP3...
[2014-03-26 12:49:47 PM] - Compressed MP3 down to 16,191,991 bytes.
[2014-03-26 12:49:47 PM] - 9 / 10
[2014-03-26 12:49:47 PM] - Encoding MP3...
[2014-03-26 12:49:58 PM] - Compressed MP3 down to 11,838,254 bytes.
[2014-03-26 12:49:58 PM] - 10 / 10
[2014-03-26 12:49:58 PM] - Encoding MP3...
[2014-03-26 12:49:58 PM] - Compressed MP3 down to 128,472 bytes.
[2014-03-26 12:49:58 PM] - Done!

[gval]

Originally Posted by Torquemurder

I put together a free tool to automate the .aa to mp3 / wav process. I call it inAudible and you can find it here.

Besides installing the Audible Manager (which all Audible users should have, anyway) it shouldn't require any additional codecs or libraries.

Features:

• Includes and installs required codecs and DLLs
• Includes LAME and will auto-encode if desired
• Allows for multiple input files and a single file destination mask
• Will split the encoded file into smaller, more managable files using silence detection to find chapter breaks

I have tested it on XP, Win7 x64 and Win 8.1. Seems to work, although 8.1 needed a reboot.

This worked perfectly for me, thanks!

[GuySmily]

Originally Posted by Torquemurder

I put together a free tool to automate the .aa to mp3 / wav process. I call it inAudible and you can find it here.

Nice work! This is an excellent tool! The splitting is an awesome feature. You might want to include zlib1.dll in your next release though.

---

For anyone getting a SOX error (when splitting is turned on), you might need zlib1.dll.

I downloaded the zipped version of SOX from here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/sox/files/sox/

and copied zlib1.dll to C:\Program Files (x86)\inAudible\