Ubuntu Aax To Mp3
May 15, 2020 Stardate: 73834.4 Tagged as: UbuntuFFmpeg
What worked out for me to convert AAX files to MP3. When I searched for a solution for this I saw many people had the same problem, so I want to share my sol. To convert.aa files to MP3, the simplest way (easiest to remember) is this: ffmpeg -i downloadedfile.aa output.mp3. The -i option just specifies the input file. The output file needs no option. This will, however, will re-encode the file (losing a little bit of quality, and it's slow).
I have a bunch of audio-books on Audible.com that I’ve collected in the past year or two. I’ve been meaning to cancel my monthly subscription but I don’t get around to it, which leads to more monthly credits, and then I don’t want to cancel and lose those unused credits…or lose the books I haven’t listed to. It’s a brilliant ploy on Audible’s part to keep their customers. So there’s the problem, I want to part ways and cancel my monthly subscription but I don’t want to lose the books that I’ve already paid for, both listened to and not.
What I learned from googling around it that you convert the audible .aax audiobook files into other formats with FFmpeg (one of my favorites!), but you have to have your unique “activation bytes” to decode the DRM. That is the tricky part. I found a couple of solutions that work great for other people but didn’t work for me with my unique hardware, configuration, situation, etc. I believe people when they say it works, it just didn’t work for me. I spent all day coming up with a solution. I tried Audiblex, AAXtoMP3-easy, audible-activator, and others, and finally the one that worked for me was inAudible-NG.
- AAX to MP3 Online Converter – Only Convert DRM-free AAX. The second option is to use an online audio converter to convert AAX to MP3. There is no need for installation, just go to the online website and convert any file you want. It's easy as a pie. I have tested more than 10 online converters recently, and Online Audio Converter is my.
- Figure 1: The YouTube to MP3 Converter is available from Ubuntu Software Center. Note that the software is proprietary and, although you are forced through the U1 payment platform, you are not charged anything.
- Audible AAX to MP3 Converter. To be found in the same folder as the AAX file. The conversion need (depending on the computing power) for 1 minute of audio approximately 2 seconds. The conversion of Aax to MP3 is fast, free, and requires no I-Tunes.
I won’t go into the long and torrid details of the failures, but rather describe the path for success.
First, log into www.audible.com and download one of your audio-books. Login, go to Library, click Download, save the file. Next, you will need to determine the SHA sum of one of your .aax files that you downloaded. Of course, you will need to have FFMpeg installed.
After all the stupid library declarations you’ll see the line [aax] file checksum and you want to copy that key that I circled in the image above. This is your checksum that is the input to RainbowCrack. RainbowCrack is a hash cracking program that uses rainbow tables to decrypt… passwords and stuff. We will be using it decrypt this hash and tell us our Audible code.
Follow the instructions on inAudible-NG github and download the zip or clone into a directory. Then go into the tables directory where the script is located and run the crack on the checksum you found using ffprobe ./rcrack . h <your checksum here>. After 2-3secs out pops the magic number.
It’s all gravy from here now that you have your unique code, you can remove the DRM from your audiobook files and decode into other other formats like mp3, mp4, m4a, m4b, flac, ogg, opus, etc, etc, etc. Note that the files you downloaded are hashed with your specific account, so it’s not like you can use my numbers, but I did obfuscate them in the images just in case.
You can use FFmpeg directly or some library front-end. I like the idea of a front-end because they most likely offer a variety of options, ease of use, and efficiency mastery that I would probably not know of. I found AAXtoMP3 very robust, easy to use, and useful - ymmv. It is simply a bash script with useful FFmpeg calls. The author has a fun “Do What the Fuck You Want To” Public License. I had a bunch of .aax files to decode and I also wanted multiple outputs for archiving (.flac, .mp3, .m4a chapters) so that I wouldn’t have to come back and do it again in the future. The solution was a simply bash script that looped through each .aax file and made multiple calls to AAXtoMP3. Here’s my batch-script:
Extras
I have an 8-core CPU and there is no use in making it wait for each thread to process. We can call multiple decoding processes at once to each run on a single core…get it? That is what the “&” in the script above is doing. It says ‘start this process thread in the background and move on’, which the script then starts another decoding process, and another, and then loops around to grab a different file then starts another decoding process, until all the CPU cores are full.
Ubuntu Aax To Mp3 Converter
Software Versions
Ubuntu Aax To Mp3 Downloader
This is an automated list of software versions used during the writing of this article.| Software | Version |
|---|---|
| OS | Ubuntu 20.04 LTS |
| bash | 5.0.16(1)-release |
| python | 2.7.4 |
| FFmpeg | 4.2.2-1 |
So far I always assumed that when I buy music or audiobooks on Amazon for download, I’ll get mp3 files for download. Far from it – yesterday I once again bought a an audiobook and had to find out that I was forwarded after the purchase to Audible and there was confronted with a “protected” aax file. If I wanted to buy at Audible, I would have gone to Audible. Thanks for nothing, Amazon!
But now the following question arises: “How do I convert the proprietary aax files into mp3’s, which I can play everywhere?” (aax files are only playable with the official Audible apps which aren’t available on all platforms.) After all, when buying on Amazon, there wasn’t the talk about the fact that the purchased audiobook […]