Backup Audible Audiobooks
How to make backups of your legally purchased Audible audiobooks.
These instructions enable you to make a backup of audiobooks you have purchased. It uses your own Audible account and encryption key to decrypt your books. Do not redistribute your DRM-free backup files. We should all support content creators and purchase the content they've produced that we like, or less quality content will be produced.
These instructions lean on several terrific open-source projects, but two in particular:
The first authenticates you and allows you to download encrypted AAX audio files from your Audible account, along with the encryption key you will need to decode them. The other takes the encryption key, decodes the downloaded AAX files, and saves them as MP3, Ogg, AAC, FLAC, or M4A.
Open your terminal. If you're on a Mac and haven't installed Homebrew yet, do so first.
The default version of bash that ships with macOS is old and incompatible with these scripts, so if you're on a Mac, start with updating bash.
brew install bash
Install the dependencies needed.
brew install ffmpeg gnu-sed grep findutils jq mp4v2 mediainfo python
pip install audible-cli
Get an authentication code from Audible's servers. You will need your Audible credentials.
audible quickstart
audible activation-bytes
Take note of the auth code "activation bytes" displayed after the last command. This is the encryption authorization key. Tuck away the contents of the auth code in a place where the decoder will look for it.
echo AUTHKEY > ~/.authcode
Replace AUTHKEY with your actual authentication key from the previous step.
Download your Audible library.
audible -v error download --all --aaxc --cover --cover-size 1215 --chapter --pdf --jobs 5 --bunch-size 200
At this point, download the decryption software and initialize decryption in to a backup file format of your choosing.
git checkout https://github.com/KrumpetPirate/AAXtoMP3
cd AAXtoMP3
chmod 766 ./*
You can run a script that will ask you several questions about your choices, including the relative path of the audiobook you want to decode.
./interactiveAAXtoMP3
You also have the option to run the decoder directly.
./AAXtoMP3 -e:mp3 --chaptered Book_Name.aaxc
You will now have an Audiobook folder that contains the output of your conversion, ready to stow away.
