Converting Audible (.aa) Files: No Searching Involved

You are so full of it. I have been a member, purchased several books, and than stopped subscribing. A year later my books are still there for me to download again and I don't have to subscribe.

From an audible faq

You need to get your facts straight. Am I curcumventing audible drm, yeah I guess so. But I'm not putting my hand in their pocket and taking money from them. You are not borrowing a book. The person who sent the book to you still has it, and now you have a copy. Only one was paid for and it's not yours.

 

Well, I didn't spent much time on it, my main goal was to find out how to reverse the DRM, because watermarking would then be out of the picture too. Still, even thought I can't tell you which algorithm they're using or how much the watermark will survive, I know that any audio coming from the driver is periodically watermarked. It's part of the decoding chain. Any audio produced. Be it "played" by Goldwave or burnt on the CD, it comes from the primary watermarking driver DLL.

Try searching their DDL's for the word "watermark" (case insensitive). What you'll find are the remnants of the compiled class called CWatermark -- or similar, don't remember exactly, it's been over a year. In case they've since removed all the debugging symbols from their libraries I can supply those I've worked on, where it's visible without any reverse engineering kung-fu, by plain hex editor.

 

This has become an interesting discussion.

On one hand, I totally agree that, once you purchase an audio book from Audible, it should be yours with no restrictions. You should be able to convert it to any audio format you choose, and play it on any device of your choice, whether it is supported by Audible or not.

On the other hand, however, I think there is an issue with making a copy of the file for a second party. Granted, Audibler makes some good points, but let's be honest....when's the last time you Zeroxed an entire book for someone else?

 

You're right, I didn't for at least 10 years. It's so much work that buying the book is easier. This, on the other hand, is extremely easy. If I sum up actual work without upload/download waiting, it doesn't take me more than a minute. Now that's fast. Of course, there was a huge amount of work involved before -- the crack took me 14 days and some of those days were quite long, if you know what I mean.

When I was finished I considered publishing the tool. It runs on any platform and even a child could use it. BUT once its use became widespread, Audible would notice. That would possibly mean legal trouble for me (remember Adobe?) and inevitable change of DRM - all work would be ruined. Basically everybody who hadn't any interest in it, suggested that I don't do it. So I didn't. It's my work and my know-how of a lifetime programmer and ethical hacker, who just tries to protect himself. I don't think it makes me the bad guy, as somebody said here before. I do everything for free. All my other works and applications are free (as in free speech and free beer) and I'm a full-time programmer. I believe in general freedom - free speech, free culture and free software - and I live accordingly. My free code isn't just in Linux, it's even in Windows and all of you use it daily.

I wanted to point out the huge difference between me and the previous speaker. I don't go around BT trackers pirating movies and music and stuff -- he does. I create, he only consumes. I fight DRM because of ethical reasons. He doesn't stand for anything but himself. He steals content off P2P daily, yet here he stands calling my thing stealing. How absurd is that? The reason is he's too envious and pissed off to see, poor angry simpleton...

DRM is the same evil as software patents and even copyright law in its current form. Unfortunately, providing people with anti-DRM tools doesn't solve anything. It only makes things worse. I offer a free service, because I cannot trust anyone of you with the tool -- not yet. I hope you understand. Free information exchange is our inseparable right. Don't let anybody tell you any different!

 

Question: who is the previous speaker?

 

I forgot to include my email! It's audible at hush dot com. Pleease, don't spam me... )

Hey! Did you try rename.pl? It's worth it. I can show you how -- paste here a few file names and for each, how you wish to rename it. I'll show you a command for each transformation...

 

A better batch file renamer is "RenameMaster" - hands down.. Google it or dl from RenameMaster installer

Also, I'm still a member of Audible.com and converting their newest to mp3 in spite of my rant a couple weeks ago. I just have to do the conversions a little different now - with one pc for downloading from them using their newest AudibleManager and another pc (on my network) using Goldwave and an older version of AM with the older WMF filter. Works great. I just dl the book to a shared folder on the first pc, then open it and convert it to mp3 using the other one. I can listen to the aa from either pc if I want and download the mp3 to my sukass Sansa e260 mp3-player that Audible doesn't support. [BTW - if you're ever thinking of buying any SanDisk stuff you better do some research. They have some very "interesting" issues with the e200 series.]

Again - "RenameMaster"! You won't be sorry about that suggestion. Also, "Tag & Rename" is the best tag batch editor I've ever tried - and I've tried many. The file renamer isn't as powerfull and user friendly as RenameMaster but the tag editor is SUPERB!

Oh - ya gotta check out the parts 1-4 TTC (The Teaching Company) collection here. At the linked site, click one of the "TTC part x" links - it shows a list of what all is included in that part. That's 87 Gigabytes if you dl'd all four parts! And 87Gb of mp3 no less! I guess that'd take ya a while to listen to ... Well... at the 44000Hz 96kb/s mono settings that most of it is recorded in, it's almost 3 months of non-stop 24 hrs/day

ut

 

But what is the actual watermark? The file owners user ID? Or something else? In other words how can an Audible be tracked once it's converted to mp3 format or audio CD's?

 

But you really don't have a clue, do you. You never used rename.pl and you don't know what regular expressions are. There is literally no limit to how you can transform text using regual expressions. Why? Because regular expressions are a full-featured programming language. What you present here is the compromise I was talking about - you lose practically all the functionality, but get a pretty GUI interface. Rename Master is not even compromise, it so debilitatingly primitive that I can without fear of wrongdoing say: the worse piece of shit is "RenameMaster" - hands down...

I ROFL knowing how absolutely incomprehensible this probably is for you. Rename.pl is a text file, effectively 40 lines long, whereas RenameMaster is a big-assed application with an installer. Yet, rename.pl is limited only by the potential of your mind and RenameMaster can only do a few fixed manipulations somebody else thought of when (wasting time) programming it. )

 

Audible origin and your unique ID, of course. If you want to know more about watermarking, look here.

 

I waited a couple of days to see if you would answer my question and you didn't. Since I'm the one who has been most outspoken against your scheme, I'm going to assume you were referring to me when you wrote the following:

I have only made comments based on what you have posted here. I have not made accusations made up out of thin air. You don't know me, obviously. I do not use BT to pirate movies, never have. Nor music and stuff. I don't use P2P to steal daily nor weekly nor yearly. You don't know me, you don't know what I do, and yet you spout off these lies.

"You Create?" Yeah, right. You have created a system by which you end up with a copy of a book you did not pay for. I believe when a merchant provides a product of value, they should be compensated for it. In your system, two people end up with the book, and only one of them paid for it. My audible books have been paid for.

Once again, you prove you don't understand what copyright infringement is. You seem to think that making a xerox copy of a book is legal. It's not. It may have been common for you to do, that doesn't make it legal. BTW, when you did this, did you use your own xerox or were you using your employer's machine, and his supplies, and his paper? This is not borrowing a book either. When a book is borrowed, only one person has it, only one person can read it. The lender of the book cannot read it until it is returned. If you have borrowed a book and make a copy, that is copyright infringement. Just because something is a common practice, does not mean it is legal.

I found the following quotes from two books, "Memoirs of an Invisible Man", and "I Am Legend" in that order.

Clearly, photocopying a book is not legal, it is copyright infringement, but you don't think so.

Please get your facts straight and stop writing your libelous statements.

 

Actually, recommending to the general public running a Pearl script from the command line, requiring the rememberence of fairly cumbersome syntax vs. the simple graphical interface of RenameMaster that, among many other features, gives you a nice preview of your changes before committing them reveals the nature of your little act.

For example (from the script code):

Code:

To rename all files matching C<*.bak> to strip the extension,
you might say

	rename 's/\.bak$//' *.bak

To translate uppercase names to lower, you'd use

	rename 'y/A-Z/a-z/' *  

I'm sure the average Joe is really going to love and appreciate having to screw with that kind of primitive syntactic crap for their every rename task! In case you haven't noticed, most PC users really don't want to have to fk with command-line syntax - duhhh. Otherwise, we'd still all be running DOS.

As far as RenameMaster being a "big-assed application with an installer" as you put it, first of all there's no installer. (Hmmm... Speaking of not even trying the app...) Secondly, the application is only 1 Mb with no dlls or other files except a 2Kb .ini file that it creates! You just double click the exe or create a shortcut to it. Real complicated! Size-wise, 1 Mb hardly qualifies as "big-assed application" unless you're still trying to run a 286 (which wouldn't surprise me). All this seems to indicate that you're just another jabber-mouth with nothing better to do than show your ass on web forums.

 

Thank You LinkVoid,
I have been looking for about a year to find a quick and easy way to convert my .aa files to wma so I can play them on my Zune. I tried them all. dbpoweramp, graphedit, notecable etc. TuneBite was the easiest but only converts at real time and requires iTunes...which I don't care for. A 10 hour book took 10 hours to convert. Yeack!

I FINALLY stumbled across your post and download the kit.

IT works Great. Vista Home Premium SP3, Media Player 11, ADM 6.5.0.3. I now convert a 10 hour book in less than 5 min. You have made it so simple.

Of course, now that Microsoft has bought Audible and Amazon it might be a moot point. As of the end of the year they say .aa files will play on Zune. But I would much rather have a converted file that can play n virtually ANY player.

Thank you soooooo much. You're the greatest.

 

I didn't know that Microsoft bought Audible & Amazon....

 

Actually, I think Amazon bought Audible. I don't believe Microsoft is involved with either.

Amazon Buys Audible

 

You guys are right. I double checked and I was wrong. Microsoft did not buy Audible or AMazon. Sorry about that. It's hard to tell what is true or false that I read out there on the internet. My sincerest apologies.

From what I can tell Amazon did indeed buy Audible. Microsoft has entered into a partnership with Audible/Amazon and will produce a Zune codec for there .aa format to play on the Zune.

Sorry for the confusion.

 

Does anyone know what file the Audible Media Converter installs and where it pus them? I could really use the locations. I am having trouble installing it and I think it is realted to a file or folder with the wrong pernissions et and I need th change them.

Thanks

 

I joined this forum just to post here, just to say THANKYOU to this poster (and everyone else) who helped me to overcome my problems in liberating my large Audible library from the .aa DRM.

As I type this GoldWave 5.08 is running through a BATCH MODE process happily saving all my .aa files as MP3's

I'm running Vista Premium 32bit and I used the process in the above quoted post. I tried the one in the OP post, but that version of Goldwave would not open the files for me. I uninstalled that version and went with the "kit" that ut1880h posted.

I'm lucky in that this desktop PC is not my main PC, so I have my Audible account linked into my Dell laptop with iTunes and the current Audible download manager that I use to manage my iPods/iPhone and handle the communication with Audible to purchase and download books.

Leaving me free to leave these old versions on this PC to handle the .aa DRM removal process. I would recommend this 2-PC system to anyone who wants a simple system of managing this process.

Thanks again to those who blazed the trail...

 

Anyone got any ideas about how to convert the new Audible Enhanced (.aax) file type to MP3.

I've tested the tried-and-true method described above but the GoldWave 5.08/Audible Manger 3.5 combo doesn't recognise the files.
Understanably I suppose seeing as how version 3.5 of the file manager wouldn't know anything about the new audible file format.

Any ideas... ?

 

I noticed the new enhanced format and have avoided it asssuming that it would cause problems for the current conversion process. Since the enhanced files are optional, the first question to ask is the new enhanced format appreciably better in audio quality?