This came in from one of our producers, Sir Bates. He says:
“I heard the Audible complaint on NAS 1730. Here’s a tip and it’s a great one.
I’ve been an Audible user since before Amazon acquired it, and users can download files from their library. However, the downloaded files use the .aax
extension, which isn’t playable outside of Audible.
I use OpenAudible, which you can get at openaudible.org, to convert .aax
files to .mp3
so I can listen on my iPod or other MP3 players.
You can also connect OpenAudible directly to your Audible account to download your entire library. Once downloaded, you have all your files as .aax
, which you can then convert to MP3 and store locally. This way, you don’t lose access to your audiobooks—even if you cancel your subscription.”
Yeah, and once they’re in MP3 format, you can use them however you want. This is a useful workaround for that issue we discussed on the last show—where you canceled your Audible subscription for ten minutes and suddenly lost all your audiobooks.
Turns out there are a few apps that can do this, but OpenAudible was the most frequently recommended one. Hopefully, we’re not violating any major copyright laws by sharing this as our tip of the day!