Access audio books

audible-activator

Amazon's Audible platform is primarily a subscription and listening service for audio books. Despite being from Amazon, and despite primarily being a subscription service, it's actually very good. As with its book-selling business, there's a huge library to choose from, and the audio and narration quality for many of the audio books is excellent. Another difference between Audible and other typical subscription services is that when you choose a book as part of your subscription, you always have access to it. In digital terms, you "own" the audio book, regardless of whether you keep the subscription going. This is particularly useful if you ever get the offer to enter a free Audible trial: If you accept and choose a couple of books, you can keep access to those books after you cancel your trial. As you might also expect, however, the audio books you now "own" are protected by DRM and remain inaccessible outside of Amazon's own apps and web portals. This is where audible-activator can help.

Audible-activator is a command-line tool designed to help you access your audio books in Audible without needing Amazon's software. It does this not with piracy but by taking your own account credentials and retrieving your personal activation data. This data can then be used to decrypt the AAX files Audible allows you to download directly from its Audible web portal. When you run the script, you'll be asked for your Amazon username and password. After you enter these, Chrome or Chromium will launch to authenticate the connection. Firefox can also be used with an optional flag. When the authentication succeeds, you're simply left with an 8-byte code. You can use this code with FFmpeg and its activation_bytes command to decrypt the file and either stream it to your audio system or save to a decrypted file. It's a great way to back up your audio books, and it lets you play them on originally unsupported systems.

Project Website

https://github.com/inAudible-NG/audible-activator

Back up your audio books and listen to them on your favorite player with audible-activator.

Image viewer