Saint Monkey

Audible seems to want to actively block the ability to rip / convert .aa files to MP3 through third party software. The fact that the non ability to use the purchased media however one wants only affects their own paying customers, astounds me. With any digital file there will always be a way to remove DRM encryption, maybe it will take some time but there are people happy to spend their time doing so. These same people are the ones most likely to upload it somewhere for others to use. So, regardless of what they do, it will always get out there on the “free market”, so in effect, they only restrict their own paying customers. More on this in a future post.

Why would I want to rip .aa to MP3?

The simple answer would be because I paid for it and wish to listen to it however I want.
I have no intention of giving it to other people, I just want to listen to them on my chosen player. Plus if I want to listen to them in the car, why cant I put the whole thing on a single CD instead of screwing the environment and spend money on 8 CD’s?
Why cant I make it future proof?
What they close down or I format my computer and can’t get online to enter my username and password?
For me, the most prominent reason why I like to have them in MP3 is because even though I have a media player listed as compatible, and if fact got my trial Audible membership from the box of my media player, the crappy Audible software doesn’t recognise it, hence I can’t play .aa files on my “compatible” MP3 player.

How to:

This is not the only way to do this but it is the only “true rip” method that I know of that currently works. Plus it is legal within the restrictions that Audible give you.

This how to works with Windows XP/Vista. If you know that it works or doesn’t work on a Mac, post a comment below.

You will need:
Audible membership with crappy Audible software.
Nero Burning Rom (or another compatible burning software. I will explain it using Nero 8).
A CD emulator (I use Magic ISO but Alcohol, Daemon Tools or any other should work fine)
WAV to MP3 encoder (there are literally hundreds out there. Google “CD to MP3″. I will use Windows Media Player 11 (WMP))

1. Open Nero Burning Rom. A “New Compilation” box should appear. Select CD on the top left side of the box. Scroll down on the left and select “Audiobook CD”. Click “New”.
On the top toolbar of Nero it will show the selected drive that the CD will burn to, click that and select “Image Recorder”.
Browse for your .aa file in the right navigation bars and drag it across into the right (empty) box. You should then see multiple CDs (CD 01 time CD name etc). Click “Burn”. The dialogue box will come up again, click “burn”.
You will then be asked to “save as”. Navigate to where you would like to save your files and click “save”. Click “Autocreate file names”. Nero will then convert your .aa file to multiple CD images on your hard drive. Close Nero when it’s finished.

2. You will now need to mount your CD image onto a your virtual drive (CD emulator).
There are a number of ways to do this but I will only write about one.
Find the icon of your virtual drive in your system tray (all those pretty little pictures in the bottom right corner of your screen), PowerISO is a little gold CD, right click it, select your drive and click “Mount Image”, navigate to your CD image and select the first one, click “open”.

3. You can now open your CD to MP3 encoder, I will use Windows Media Player 11 (WMP) for this purposes because most people have this.
Open WMP and click “rip”. Select your drive on the left and WMP should automatically start ripping to MP3 (or wma if you have that set in your preferences).
Once the first CD has been ripped, without closing WMP, repeat step 2 for the next CD and WMP should automatically start ripping. Repeat until all CDs are ripped.

4. Step 4 is optional.
Navigate to where WMP put your MP3s “Music” or “My music” by default.
Name your folder “Book Name CD1” etc. Go into the folder and select all MP3 files in the folder. Right click and click “properties” select the “details” tab and in the “artists” field write “Book Name”, in the album field write “Book name CD#”.

Your done.

It seems a little complicated but it is actually very simple. The most time consuming part of the process in step 4 but that is completely optional, although I would recommend at least naming the folders as the time and date system that WMP uses can be a little hard to navigate 6 months down the track.