Sure! 1. Click on Start -> Programs -> Nero -> Tools -> Nero ImageDrive. This will open Nero ImageDrive. 2. Check the box to enable the first drive 3. Next, click on the tab that says "First drive" 4. Click the button with the elipsis (three dots) to open a dialog box to select your nrg (disk image) file 5. Navigate to your nrg file 6. Click "Open" to select it 7. Click OK to accept your changes, and close ImageDrive You should now have an "extra" CD drive (you can see it in Windows Explorer) and if you open Nero to rip, you will be able to see this new drive. Hope this helps and feel free to get back to me if you get stuck of have any further questions. David
davidlan: You ARE the man!!!!!! After many late nights and vowing to never, ever try to convert anything to anything else - it works!!!!!! I actually converted Part 5 of "Churchill" in its entirety from the friggin' .aa to .mp3!!!! Coincidentally, I find that my fancy new(er) HP m7330n Media Center PC doesn't like the "Image Drive" feature, so I downloaded Nero 7 Trial on my old "Heintz" PC and it worked like a charm. Now, maybe within the next five hundred years, I might consider even uttering the words "Audible.com". To my clouded way of thinking, they have alienated prospective buyers with their antics. For sure, they have given me a reason to think before I buy from them again. After all, THANKS AGAIN for your help!! kjohn
Fellow audiobook fans... Don't be too angry at Audible. They provide excellent audio books at way lower prices than you can buy from the bookstore. Isn't that why we go to them? On one hand, they are in business to make money. On the other, it probably is a premature conclusion to believe all the compatibility issues are audible's fault. I bet 'those' mp3 player manufacturers aren't willing to have contracts with audible or they don't make one that will support protected formats, but we blame audible. That isn't audible's fault. So many do make players that work with audible that it can't be that difficult for those companies to get on board. Audible files play on an ipod. None of the online music places do aside from itunes (napster, yahoo, etc). Also, audible files are compatible with many players. I am surprised your creative player won't work with audible manager. I have two creative mp3 players, and audible recognized them 'out of the box'. You may want to check the creative website for updated drivers if you haven't already. You can also hit up audible customer service about it. I have found their customer service to be top notch. I use soundtaxi to convert music files so I can play them on my ipod from napster to go. I pay for the service, so they get their money, I just have the wrong type player. Ipods really are the best. The only places I can't get audible files to play on is my Verizon phone and my xbox360. This is not audible's fault, but verizon's and microsoft's, and for that matter, apple's when it comes to the ipod and itunes. Verizon wants everyone to use their mp3 service and microsoft wants everyone to buy a zune instead of an ipod or other player. I bet audible would happily provide their codec to these companies if these companies were willing. Audible has a codec for one simple reason, the content providers require it and audible requires it, to protect their product from piracy. You would do the same. Don't turn away from audible if you enjoy audio books without a bit more effort. I would hate to see your pocketbook get killed by the bookstore. Also, I joined audible platinum and averaged around $9 per audiobook. Try to do that at a bookstore. I had way more content than I could listen to. I backed off to the $9/yr membership just so I have a year to catch up. Happy listening!
I am having a problem with Nero 7 Trial. It seems to be hit and miss to offer .mp3 format when I try to "convert to other formats" from .nrg. I did two parts of my Churchill book, both showed multiple tracks and it worked fine, converting to .mp3. I tried to do the same with another, smaller part. It shows one track and won't offer .mp3 as a format. Any suggestions??
Can someone who has soundtaxi describe how they're using it. The only way I can get it to convert is to play the book on wmp and soundtaxi records it in real time. My sound card will do that. It sounds like others are using soundtaxi and converting without playing with wmp.
I was finally successful converting .aa files in Goldwave by simply hitting "save as...," as described in the beginning of this thread in 2004. This is now 2007 and Audible has plugged most of the holes. I followed everyone's instructions and got nowhere, until I found the old Windows Media filter. The trick is that you need an old version of the Windows Media Player filter software, which is the key ingredient. The latest versions don't work anymore, regardless of your sound conversion software. Here's the recipe that worked for me. I'm running Windows XP SP2, I had to uninstall my recent versions and set it up like this: 1. Windows Media Player rolled back to verion 9. 2. Uninstalled Audible Manager, planning to install the 3.5 version posted earlier in this thread. I never did, and didn't need it for converting. If I want to download more from my Audible account, I'll need to reinstall some version of Audible Manager again. Your version of AM might not matter. Same for Audible Download Manager. 3. the key: AudibleMediaPlayerFilter.exe, version 1.0.0.1. Remove later versions. This piece unlocks the .aa format for other software to read. Goldwave and RiverPast will not understand .aa files unless you have this, regardless of your version of Goldwave or Riverpast. If you have a newer version of this filter, Audible has fixed the "vulnerability." I found it here: http://blog.davidwaterston.com/2006/08/09/audible-unlimited/ Direct download link to the filter: http://www.coolutils.com/Downloads/AudibleMediaPlayerFilter.exe 4. Goldwave v5.2 (latest version: the version of your sound converter might not matter) With all this in place, Start and Stop your .aa file in windows media player to make sure it's at the beginning. If it's not at the beginning, it will confuse Goldwave and it won't work. Open your .aa file in Goldwave. You have to select "all types" or something like that in the Open dialog box. Goldwave should chew on the .aa for a little while, unpacking it. Once it's open, choose "save as..." and pick your format of choice. I used MP3 (after installing the lame_enc.dll codec -- google for "LAME MP3" and download the latest version, then put the .dll in the Goldwave folder) but the MP3 came out rather large (after a lot of processing time). Not unreasonable, at 44MB for 80 minutes of audio. I guess you can use a different compression setting. I also saved as WMA, which was much faster, 4MB, but the sound quality was bad. At this point, it's just fiddling to find a good compression setting, the hard work is over. I hope others find the software versions described above and it works for them. Thanks for the help given in this thread.
This is an old thread but I recently joined audible.com via twit.com for the freebie book on their trial plan. My mp3 player (samsung z5) doesn't play .aa files. I used Nero to burn the files to the image drive and then extracted the image to mp3 using Media Monkey Gold. Worked perfectly.
Copy aa to mp3 using media player 11, Goldwave 5.2 & Older Audiblemediaplayerfilter. I 1st installed Goldwave 4.26, tried it, it didn't work, so I tried installing version 5.20 and it still didn't work. So I read some more of the above "How to's" and found out that I need to install the older version of "AUDIBLEMEDIAPLAYERFILTER" http://www.coolutils.com/Downloads/AudibleMediaPlayerFilter.exe So I did, then I started playing the file I wanted to convert in WMP11, stopped it, and set it back to the begining. Then I opened it in Goldwave 5.20 by selecting "ALL FILE TYPES" I was then able to convert it to MP3 with no trouble at all. Thank You danjoh99 for your input. I did this and it worked perfectly.
Alternate Method for .aa to .mp3 Conversion This is the method I have been using for years. It's nice because you get short little chapters instead of one long .mp3 file. Use the Audible Manager to burn the .aa to CD's 1hr 17min each then all you have to do is start windows media player in rip mode and put the new CD's you just made in and convert them to nice short .mp3 chapters. It takes a little longer & does use up CD's but they are good for playing in your car if you don't have an indash MP3 player. If you don't want to use up a few CD-R's use CD-RW's. Between this and the one above everyone should be able to convert their .aa files they paid for to MP3 format for their listening enjoyment.
Well, I just read all 22 pages (ok, I only 'skimmed' some of it) of this thread and was amazed that there was only one mention of TotalRecorder and no mention of MP3 DirectCut. And that the post that mentions TotalRecorder erroneously states that it only converts in real time. Including MP3 encoding I get about 8X conversion and drop the big file on MP3 DirectCut which neatly chops it into whatever size chunks I want and spits it out as sequentially numbered MP3 chunks. I can easily get at least 30 hours of 'book' in six minute chunks on an MP3 CD for my commute.
First, great job getting through all pages... Can you be swell and summarize it for the rest of us. I have read it all once or so, but it has been so long As far as TotalRecorder, how long does it take to convert an 8 hour book and does it require codec hoop jumping?
Oh yeah, and isn't it a pain having 30 little files on your player that you have to scroll through every six minutes to find the next one in the sequence? Seems like it would sort them wrong, like... file.1.mp3 file.11.mp3 file.2.mp3 ...
Well, if I remember my gazzinta's from grade school, at 8X, let me see, 8 gazzinta 8 uh, 1 time. So that's one hour to convert. As to 'hoops', it does use LAME to encode the WAV stream generated by Audible Manager. And no, the people who wrote MP3 Direct Cut aren't stupid enough to not include an appropriate number of leading zeros. If six minute chunks ain't to your liking, it can separate them by any time span or even detect silence. I like six minutes because the second significant digit in the file name is the 'hours' place.
isnt there a way to edit the audio file without converting it. i cant tell u how much i'd pay for a program like that
Hi i have been using goldwave to convert aa files to mp3 for some time now and it has work very well but now i have a problem I have just moved to a new computer and installed all the old software and i now have a problem when i try to play a aa file in windows media or gold wave i loose the last few seconds of any track averything else work ok i just carnt get the last few minutes. Anybody got any ideas please Regards
I have been monitoring this forum for a couple of years now and tried several of the suggested methods. What has consistently worked best for me is sound SoundTaxi.
Thanks for the advice. I have been using goldwave for quite a while now and i have found it does a brilliant job and has worked very well, untill i moved every thing onto a new computer and now it will not play the last few seconds of ht track. Also windows media player 9 will not play the last few seconds so i do belive its not goldwave problem. if this is in both media player 9 and goldwave i would think that soundtaxi will be the same. Ps it still works ok on my old computer regards
I followed all the advice... 1) I uninstalled the Audible Software 2) I downloaded the filter pack and installed it. I was missing the MSVCI70.dll, so I had to get that seperatelly off the web. 3) I open Microsoft Media 9 and tried to play the file, but it would not recognize it. Goldwave 5.20 did not recognize it either. 4) I upgraded to Media 11, and tried again, but again it failed. I downloaded my media recently. Is it possible they upgraded the .aa format so the old filter won't work with it? I tried one more thing: - Upgraded to the latest audible software - Tried playing with media-center, and it worked. - Installed the old audible filters (without uninstalling anything) - Media-center stopped recognizing the file. ------ Gregory
