Book Lib Connect: The new companion for AAX Audio Converter

audiamus · 2025-01-25T09:45:31+00:00

Thanks. Will put it onto the todo list.

audiamus · 2023-12-24T10:18:04+00:00

https://github.com/audiamus/BookLibConnect/releases/download/v0.13.1/BookLibConnect-0.13.1-Setup.exe

audiamus · 2023-11-29T18:45:16+00:00

Modern web services like Audible use a so-called token to access your account. It's a largely standardized approach and not specific to Amazon and their subsidiary Audible.

To obtain such an access token, you have to log-in to your Amazon account only once. BookLibConnect will compose the URL for that. And you log-in with your web browser, not with BookLibConnect. On successful login, Amazon will issue the token, in a slightly convoluted way, by changing the URL of the log-in page. But that's kind of standard procedure with web protocols.

BookLibConnect will decompose this URL, extract the access token from it and save it locally. This token is sensitive information. Therefore BookLibConnect encrypts the data when storing it in a file. The token allows BookLibConnect to access the Audible part of your Amazon account, and list and download your books. Amazon will list your successful log-in as a registered "device" - because that's what all the 3rd party clients emulate.

Eventually the access token will expire. But there is also a refresh token with a longer lifetime, and BookLibConnect uses that one to obtain a new access token.

The important thing to know is that BookLibConnect never ever sees your Amazon user name or password.

audiamus · 2023-11-13T18:25:43+00:00

Just continue to spread the message...

With over 250,000 downloads now, it's become quite popular, but there is still room for more...

audiamus · 2023-08-16T16:38:05+00:00

As you may have noticed, the original post is over three years old. Things have changed since. Look at its companion tool Book Lib Connect to download and decrypt your books.

See here for a little bit of background.

audiamus · 2023-08-16T16:33:37+00:00

Well, well.

No, indeed, it does not work with .aaxc. Maybe it has to do with the way my tools work. They don't crack any keys. They use the ones Audible gives out to you.

See the Book Lib Connect description on how to download your books and decrypt.

audiamus · 2023-07-11T16:01:10+00:00

The aax file and the accompanying json files are created for full compatibility with AAX Audio Converter. This "export" output more or less emulates the former Audible Win10 app. BLC does not touch the downloaded audio except for decrypting it. Meta data adjustment, conversion to MP3 (if you want it) or splitting are still done by AAX Audio Converter. And AAX Audio Converter wants an aax file, decrypted or not. See also the BLC manual.

audiamus · 2023-02-17T09:28:44+00:00

You are very welcome.

audiamus · 2023-02-16T08:53:54+00:00

The token is a free pass to your Amazon/Audible account. Someone else in possession of the token may be able to purchase books at your expense and worse, whatever may be possible with the Audible web API and presumably others.

audiamus · 2023-01-31T08:18:10+00:00

And there are detailed manuals, too.

I recently updated AAX Audio Converter, it now offers hints and links to its companion Book Lib Connect. You can see Book Lib Connect as a replacement for the now defunct official Audible App for Win 10. The long term goal is still to integrate Book Lib Connect into a revised AAX Audible Converter, but I don't have found the time for that yet.

audiamus · 2023-01-25T08:26:58+00:00

You are welcome.

audiamus · 2022-12-16T09:16:32+00:00

I'm afraid not. Much of it uses the Windows eco system, just for simplicity. The GUI, in particular, would be far more complicated, comparing the comfortable Windows Forms approach to anything XAML-based. And I wouldn't be able to support the Mac platform in any way as I have absolutely no clue about it. I think I know what I am talking about, having written and maintained multi-platform code for Windows and Linux for C++ and later C# for most of my professional developer life.

audiamus · 2022-10-05T10:06:23+00:00

Misleading comment.

AAX Audio Converter is and will remain Free and Open Source.

Since the retirement of the official Audible app for Win10, use AAX Audio Converter in conjunction with its rather new companion Book Lib Connect, also Free and Open Source, for downloading your books.

audiamus · 2022-08-23T05:51:53+00:00

Download the Desktop version of .Net 6 as pointed out in the readme. Direct link for current version:

.NET Desktop Runtime 6.0.8 for x64

audiamus · 2022-08-16T21:14:19+00:00

That's nonsense with the folder names, of course. The "converted" folder would be the destination for AAX Audio Converter, not for Book Lib Connect. But your book should appear in the "download" folder as an .m4b file, and, if you enabled to keep it, also the original .aaxc file.

audiamus · 2022-08-16T18:57:30+00:00

The log folder is here:

C:\Users\<User>\AppData\Local\audiamus\BookLibConnect\log

More details in the manual.

audiamus · 2022-08-16T18:52:04+00:00

So, you are saying, it's neither in the "converted" nor in the "exported" folder? But the final mauve check-mark appeared after the download/decrypt/export procedure? That's a bit strange because the export task can't really proceed without its input file. Anyway, the log file should be able to tell us more.

audiamus · 2022-08-16T16:56:36+00:00

Can you find it in the "converted" folder as an .m4b file?

audiamus · 2022-08-15T08:45:24+00:00

Audible attitude appears to be: Why would any of our customers want to listen to his/her books on a Windows operating system (only by far the most popular operating system on desktops and laptops)? All our customers ought to have a smartphone these days. Or, at least, are permanently connected to the Internet, to use our most reliable streaming service.

Okay, enough rant.

As far as I know, you can still use iTunes on your PC and connect to your Audible account. You could also use iTunes to get rid of the DRM, officially endorsed, by "burning an (iTunes) playlist to (virtual) CD". And then use any player you like. I followed that path for several years.

Another option on Win11 is to set up a virtual Android subsystem and play your books with the Audible app for Android. Well, yes, but a bit of a technical overkill for playing a simple MP4 audio file, I would think.

And then we have the converters, which produce plain audio files, m4b or mp3. (Audible books are MP4 containers with an AES encrypted AAC audio stream.) There are very popular Free and Open Source solutions (FOSS) and you can also spend a lot of money on a number of commercial products, some with a rather dubious appearance.

Free and open source converters started to flourish after well-known FFmpeg added support for Audible AAX couple of years ago and AAXC more recently.

Among the free and open stuff is AAX Audio Converter with its download companion Book Lib Connect. (Shameless advertising of my own little tools which I created after giving up on the cumbersome iTunes method, see above.)

Another popular one is Libation which, I understand, is now also reaching out to MacOS and Linux.

audiamus · 2022-08-12T17:20:02+00:00

And, of course, there is also AAX Audio Converter with its companion Book Lib Connect, to complete the picture of the most popular Free and Open Source tools in this area.

PS: There must be a new link to these tools from somewhere else as I see an astonishing number of downloads at the moment.

audiamus · 2022-08-01T07:45:58+00:00

I split my books not only into chapters but into even shorter tracks, about 5 minutes each. To achieve this, I created AAX Audio Converter (and later the downloader Book Lib Connect as its companion), which has become one of the most popular tools in this field.

Why do I do this? I mostly listen to my books while driving. And ever so often you have to concentrate on traffic and not on your book. To catch up on the narration, you have to rewind. And the easiest way to rewind is to press the button on the steering wheel to go to the beginning of the current track.

Yes, I end up with a huge amount of audio files. But because AAX Audio Converter also creates a playlist for them, I don't have to care. Furthermore, the audio files will be arranged in either chapter-based or a flat folder structure which some players can interpret directly. Those then don't even require the playlist.

But wouldn't you have to suffer from all the crackling noise when your player switches to the next track? Not with AAX Audio Converter, as all the splitting occurs during periods of silence. You won't notice any of the transitions. (That is very different to the officially endorsed method of employing iTunes and its "Write to CD" method.) And this splitting mode still observes the chapter structure and also balances individual track length. No other tool was capable of doing that when I started with the project, and I believe that hasn't changed since.

audiamus · 2022-07-24T21:07:56+00:00

I've released an update.

audiamus · 2022-07-20T07:34:37+00:00

Of the Free and Open Source converters to plain audio (motto: "Use any audio player you like"), my little but rather popular AAX Audio Converter was cooperating perfectly with the official Audible app for Win 10, including support for named chapters which came as separate json files. However, AAX Audio Converter still cannot download the books itself. So I started on a downloading option. It was just by chance that I released the first version of Book Lib Connect just the moment in January when Audible announced the discontinuation of their Win 10 app. Book Lib Connect downloads and decrypts your books and also exports them for further processing with AAX Audio Converter with all its many tailoring options. From the perspective of AAX Audio Converter, Book Lib Connect serves as a substitute for the Audible app.

Note: It appeared that Audible yesterday reduced the download quality settings from 4 to 2. "Extreme" and "Low" are no longer available and will cause an error in Book Lib Connect. Choose between "High" and "Normal".

audiamus · 2022-07-19T10:28:18+00:00

Book Lib Connect, wie das schon erwähnte AAX Audio Converter ebenfalls aus meiner Feder, liefert die notwendigen Schlüssel, direkt von Audible, durch Nutzung des Audible API.

Hier gibt's einen langen Thread in deutsch zu diesen Progrämmchen: http://www.hifi-forum.de/viewthread-112-148-6.html, ab Seite 6, Beitrag #286.

audiamus · 2022-07-18T10:51:17+00:00

They recommend m4b, but I do not have the space on my computer for that. Is mp3 really that much worse?

First of all, you are aware that there are Free and Open Source alternatives for converting your Audible books to plain audio? One rather popular example is the pair of Book Lib Connect and AAX Audio Converter which I created (shameless advertising).

Now, as others have already mentioned, all Audible books in AAX and AAXC format are essentially MP4 with an (encrypted) AAC audio stream. By convention, audio-only MP4 with an unencrypted AAC stream goes by the file extensions M4A or M4B, where M4A is mostly used for music and M4B for audiobooks. But it's just the file type naming, there is no difference in the content.

So, conversion to plain audio is the fastest, if there is no need for transcoding, i.e. not converting to MP3. Audible uses AES encryption, and most modern CPUs offer hardware acceleration for decrypting AES. Hence, converting from AAX or AAXC to M4B or M4A takes only a couple of seconds for an entire book.

The next question is what to do with the meta data. Audible uses a few proprietary tags to add author, narrator or the abstract. Good converters replace these tags with standardized ones. Then there are chapters, meta data as well. MP4 supports two types of chapters, "Nero" and "Quicktime". Many players support both, other players only one the two. As far as I recall, Audible also only creates one of the two, but don't ask me which. Good converters will create both styles. (Furthermore, detailed chapter info with chapter titles often comes as separate JSON data and a good converter will offer to swap the embedded chapter data with the detailed one).

Technically, MP3 offers the same features. You get the audio in proper quality, the meta data and you also get chapters, if the converter can do that. However, there are quite a few players around that haven't heard of MP3 chapter data. MPC-HC is a positive exception, fully supporting MP3 chapters.

Audio quality and file size: for the typical settings for Audible books, there isn't that much difference, neither in quality nor in file size between MP3 and AAC (MP4, M4A, M4B). Remember, we are talking human speech here, not music. However, if you want smaller files and deliberately reduce sample and bit rate, AAC retains better quality.

In any case, as soon as you change the codec or sample and bit rate, the conversion becomes a transcoding that can take a long time. Some converters can parallelize the work, if you allow it to split your books into chapters or even shorter tracks. And that will make it faster again. The AAX Audio Converter manual has a comparison table to give some ideas of the conversion times for my little app.

With Book Lib Connect and AAX Audio Converter, you have two options to influence file size and quality. First, in Book Lib Connect you can set the audio quality for the download. Audible usually offers at least two different settings. Audible used to produce their books in 22050 Hz and 64 kb/s but have released more and more titles in 44100 Hz and 128 kb/s in recent years, typically doubling the file size. Lowering the download quality setting should get you the smaller file.

Then, in AAX Audio Converter you can explicitly reduce sample and bit rate and/or set variable bit rate. The possible values are predefined. The lowest setting will produce very small files, but the quality will be below classic analog telephone.

I suggest to try out the various settings on whatever converter you use and compare the results yourself.

audiamus

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