Audible Downloader

• Uses audible-activator to get the authentication for the streams.
  • I modified the file a little bit to add support for the remote WebDriver.
• To do this without having to mess around configuring Chrome/Python/selenium, it uses docker-selenium to create standalone containers that can be controlled remotely.
• Converts AAX files to MP3 using AAXtoMP3.

If I get around to it, I would like to try doing all of the above using containers, but presently I am just using containers to avoid having to futz with setting up Selenium/WebDriver stuff with my usual browser.

Setup

Clone this repository, ensuring submodules are cloned as well:

git clone https://github.com/rldotai/audible-downloader.git --recurse-submodules 

I'm assuming you have docker installed; if not, you should probably do that.

This is what worked for me, running Ubuntu 20.04; if you're running a different OS or something's not working, you may have to make some modifications of your own. Check the READMEs in the submodules for guidance on how to do that.

Audible Activator

Install the requirements and copy modified-audible-activator.py to add the "remote" option.

pip install -r requirements.txt
cp modified-audible-activator.py audible-activator/modified-audible-activator.py

AAXtoMP3

Install prerequisites:

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg x264 x265 bc mediainfo

Usage

Get Activation Code

Using Selenium Docker Image

This avoids the need to setup a WebDriver-capable browser directly on your machine, because we instead download and run a container that's running a compatible version of Chrome. If you already have Selenium setup and working on your host, you might be better off just running it directly (rather than by using a container) -- see audible-activator on how to do that. Alternatively, you could perhaps find the activation bits by just using your browser's DevTools, if neither approach seems appealing.

Without further ado:

# Start the Chrome WebDriver container
docker run -d -p 4444:4444 -v /dev/shm:/dev/shm selenium/standalone-chrome:4.0.0-beta-1-20210215

# Get the activation bytes
python audible-activator/modified-audible-activator.py --remote --username=<USERNAME> --password=<PASSWORD>

This should print your activation/auth code in the terminal.

Convert the Files

Supposing that my authcode was 1337c0d3 and that my audiobooks were stored in ~/Downloads/audiobooks as a bunch of .aax files, I could convert them to m4a and store the results in output using:

# Convert the books
python convert-books.py --authcode=1337c0d3 --outdir=output ~/Downloads/audiobooks/*.aax

Further details can be found via python convert-books.py --help.

Note that some of the options (like the filename formats and output filetype) are hardcoded, largely because I am lazy and increasingly keen on finishing up this script so I can listen to some audiobooks.