Audible DRM Removal for personal use
This works:
- Use audible-activator once to get your activation bytes string
ffmpeg -activation_bytes ACTIVATION_BYTES -i input.aax -vn -c:a copy output.mp4
That's it. It's also incredibly fast, converting at several thousand times realtime speed on my laptop.
I've explored this path before and you'll find you have 2 options. You can run the Audible software under Wine, or you can run it natively inside a VM (VirtualBox) using Windows.
If you're interested in the Wine route take a look at the WineHQ page. Specifically this page, titled: Category: Main > Multimedia > Audio > AudibleManager.
Using this method you'll be extracting the .aa files out to CDs, from which you can extract .mp3 files. Your path is basically .wav to .mp3.
You can try saving an actual CD by buring them to a .iso file which you can then mount and rip down to .mp3's from there.
Because of the DRM the path is intentionally painful, making you perform various steps in a manual manner.
References
- How to listen to Audible files?
- Audible Linux – How to Install in Ubuntu?
There are possibilities to convert aax to mp3 on linux. It just worked fine for me with AAXtoMP3 and audible-activator.
Here is a detailed howTo