Audiobooks

Long form podcasts

November 11, 2014 — November 22, 2024

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Figure 1

1 Suppliers of audiobooks

  • Quasi-monopoly supplier, Amazon’s Audible has probably the biggest selection. Australians permitted.
  • Spotify does audiobooks now. Australians permitted. It’s fiddly, measuring out a kind of annoying duration of time per month.
  • The classic free/volunteer one is librivox, releasing open audiobooks from copyright-free classics.
  • Open Culture indexes miscellaneous free audiobooks.
  • Commercial service with permissive licensing libro.fm (No Australians allowed).
  • Commercial service downpour. No Australians permitted.

2 Converters and metadata manager software

Audiobooks are chaos. More chaos even than music. Between a bunch of DRM formats, a bunch of metadata formats, and a bunch of file formats, it is hard to just play the danged things unless you stay inside the walled garden that is the official app of one particular supplier.

Audible, for example, would like us to listen to our books in one of the mandated Audible playing apps, which are not the most pleasant audio player.

It is a better experience, IMO, if I can transcode the audio to an open format so that a more competitive audio player can be used, and keep the audio files organised in a way that makes sense to me. Thus, there is a small cottage industry in tools which convert audiobook files, audiobook metadata and which store and organise them.

2.1 OpenAudible

Openaudible is my pick of the options. It does most of the things I want reasonably automatically. It knows neat tricks such as

  • bulk metadata export so you can sync your listening data to goodreads.com or a blog or whatever, and
  • being cross-platform.
  • organizing files in a consistent manner (slightly too opinionated for me, but I can live with it),
  • handling artwork and chapter markers pretty reliably.

It is the only one that has continued to work reliably for me over time, and even added features when others have failed to even continue working. As such, I applaud their efforts.

Things it does not do well:

  • manage non Audible audiobooks
  • concatenate or split audiobooks

Overall, this probably suits people who mostly listen to Audible.com books and would like a superior experience.

I paid for a licence, USD18 for 1 year of upgrades.

Historical note: Do not be confused by the name; Openaudible is not open source software although it was. This is a sad loss, but nonetheless, the actual user experience of this app is better than the open-source volunteer-run alternatives, so I count it as acceptable.

2.2 My own hacky script to concatenate MP3s into books

Crowdsourced or public domain audiobooks are often available as “chapterized” MP3s, i.e. in many small files. Apple Books suddenly stopped working reliably for such things, so I got ChatGPT to write me a script to concatenate them using ffmpeg. That worked but was shambolic and annoying and slow. Maybe try a more sophisticated option.

2.3 m4b-tool

sandreas/m4b-tool seems like it might be easier.

m4b-tool is a finicky selection of PHP scripts with a lot of dependencies, but I am told it works? It does not easily work for me per default; I might need to install docker and run it in a container.

2.4 tone

See also andreas/tone which is an m4b-tool reboot. Looks more compact but less featureful.

2.5 Bragibooks and m4b-merge

djdembeck/bragibooks

An audiobook library cleanup and management tool built with Python and Django. Leveraging m4b-merge for audiobook standardization and editing. Ideal for enhancing audiobook library management.

m4b-merge is in turn dependent on m4b-tool, which is a complicated Python script to invoke in turn a complicated PHP script, which feels like too many layers of indirection.

It has some unintuitive, destructive behaviour; for example, per default if I do anything to a source file, regardless of whether it succeeds or not, that file is moved to ~/input/done, without any hint that it has done so (boom! books vanished!), and there does not seem to be any way to disable this behaviour. One can, at most, change the destination path.

The output files per default end up in ~/output/. On the other hand, it does cool stuff like use Audible as a canonical source of truth for book metadata and artwork.

Using sloppily-designed power tools that might hurt me is kinda my jam, so I am still using it occasionally.

2.6 Audiobookshelf

Audiobookshelf is an open-source self-hosted media server for your audiobooks and podcasts.

Features include…

  • Companion android and iOS app w/ offline listening (in beta)
  • Multi-user support w/ custom permissions
  • Keeps progress per user and syncs across devices
  • Lookup and apply metadata and cover art from several providers
  • Audiobook chapter editor w/ chapter lookup
  • Audiobook tools: Embed metadata in audio files & merge multiple audio files to a single m4b
  • Search and add podcasts to download episodes w/ auto-download
  • Open RSS feeds for audiobooks and podcast episodes
  • Backups with automated backup scheduling
  • Basic ebook support and ereader (epub, pdf, cbr, cbz) + send to device (i.e. Kindle)
  • And much more…

If you are interested in integrating with Audiobookshelf, visit the API documentation.

Seems to provide useful GUI tools for managing a large collection of books sourced from several providers. And podcasts? Huh.

2.7 AAXtoMp3

Minimalist audiobook converter. Free. Only just noticed, so I have not used it KrumpetPirate/AAXtoMP3: Convert Audible’s .aax filetype to MP3, FLAC, M4A, or OPUS

The purpose of this software is to convert AAX (or AAXC) files to common MP3, M4A, M4B, flac and ogg formats through a basic bash script frontend to FFMPEG.

2.8 inAudible

rmcrackan/inAudible: inAudible installers

Among the ffmpeg library’s versatile options is the ability to remove DRM from .aa and .aax files. However, command line programs can be intimidating and cryptic. inAudible eliminates the intimidation and also adds several other features. Unfortunately, inAudible is currently only available on torrenting sites. Torrenting is a way of distributing any kind of file but it has a bad reputation due to being a popular method of pirating media and software. This gives many people pause about obtaining inAudible even though it is neither pirated nor illegal. Also, torrenting sites are sometimes blocked by work, schools, public hotspots, and internet providers. This can make it impossible to obtain inAudible.

2.9 DRMare

DRmare Audible Converter for Mac and Windows (USD35/year):

A comprehensive Audible solution to losslessly download and convert Audible audiobooks from AA, AAX to MP3, FLAC, M4A, M4B, 2AV, AC3, etc. at 100X faster conversion speed without requiring account authorization.

Have not tried it.

2.10 Macsome

Macsome Audiobook/itunes converter (macOS/Windows) is sporadically updated, but sometimes works.

2.11 Tuneskit

tuneskit seemed to not work any longer last time I checked. (macOS/Windows)

2.12 Noteburner

noteburner seems to have dropped audiobook support. (Windows/macOS)

3 Hacks

A fish shell script for macos. It scans a folder for .m4b files, let’s say /Drive/Audiobooks. It find the name of the author of each file $AUTHORNAME and move it to a new fold say /Drive/Sorted/$AUTHORNAME. For example, suppose /Drive/Audiobooks/Too Like the Lightning.m4b has author Ada Palmer in its metadata. It should end up at /Drive/Sorted/Ada Palmer/Too Like the Lightning.m4b.

#!/usr/bin/env fish

# Define the source and target directories
set source_dir "/Drive/Audiobooks"
set target_dir "/Drive/Sorted"

# Ensure the target directory exists
mkdir -p $target_dir

# Loop through each .m4b file in the source directory
for file in (find $source_dir -type f -name "*.m4b")
    # Extract the author metadata using ffprobe
    set author (ffprobe -v error -show_entries format_tags=artist -of default=noprint_wrappers=1:nokey=1 "$file")

    # Check if author metadata was found
    if test -z "$author"
        echo "No author metadata found for $file. Skipping."
        continue
    end

    # Create the target directory for the author if it doesn't exist
    set author_dir "$target_dir/$author"
    mkdir -p "$author_dir"

    # Move the file to the author's directory
    mv "$file" "$author_dir/"

    echo "Moved $file to $author_dir"
end