First run these commands:
brew install chromedriver ffmpeg
sudo easy_install pip
pip install selenium requests
git clone https://github.com/inAudible-NG/audible-activator
cd audible-activator
sed -i '' 's,chromedriver_path = "./chromedriver",chromedriver_path = "/usr/local/bin/chromedriver",' audible-activator.py
./audible-activator.py
Then enter your Audible username and password and wait for a while for the eight character activation key to be printed.
If you do not run the sed
command that changes the value of the chromedriver_path
variable, ./audible-activator.py
results in an error like 'chromedriver' executable needs to be in PATH
even if chromedriver
is on the path or in the audible-activator
directory. If your sed
is GNU sed
, replace sed -i ''
with sed -i
.
After that run a command like this:
ffmpeg -activation_bytes youractivationkey -i input.aax -c copy output.m4b
(I edited the command above based on the comments by LiWang and marcus erronius to replace output.m4a;mv output.m4{a,b}
with output.m4b
and to replace -vn -c:v copy
with -c copy
.)
If you try to use the ffmpeg
command above with an aa
file instead of an aax
file, it results in an error like Option activation_bytes not found
. To download a book from Audible as aax
instead of aa
, choose "Enhanced" from the "Audio Quality" dropdown in the view for downloading a book.
aax
files are encrypted mp4
/ m4a
/ m4b
files so the ffmpeg
command above does not re-encode audio and it preserves metadata such as chapters. mp4
, m4a
, and m4b
are alternative filename extensions for the MPEG-4 Part 14 container format. The m4a
and m4b
extensions were originally introduced by Apple. One difference between the m4a
and m4b
extensions is that the option to remember the previous playback position in iTunes is enabled by default for files with an m4b
extension but not for files with an m4a
extension. iTunes also displays files with an m4b
extension under audiobooks by default.
Old versions of iTunes did not have the checkbox to enable remembering the previous playback position, but remembering the previous playback position was always enabled for files with an m4b
extension, so even Wikipedia still incorrectly states that "an .m4a
audio file cannot "bookmark" (remember the last listening spot), whereas .m4b
extension files can." (Even though I don't know if there are still other media players which behave like old versions of iTunes in that respect.)
The UTI for the m4b
extension is com.apple.protected-mpeg-4-audio
and Finder shows the kind of all m4b
files as "protected MPEG-4 audio" even though all files with an m4b
extension do not have copy protection.