Audiobooks
Long form podcasts
November 11, 2014 — August 26, 2024
1 Suppliers of audiobooks
- 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.
- Quasi-monopoly, Amazon’s Audible has probably the biggest selection. Australians permitted.
2 Converters and metadata managers
Audible would like you to listen to your books in one of the mandated Audible playing apps, which are not the most pleasant audio players. It is better if we can transcode the audio to an open format so that a more competitive audio player can be used. There are a few options here, but IMO one clear front-runner.
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..
2.1 m4b-tool
That worked, but it also recommended to me sandreas/m4b-tool which seems like it might be easier. See also andreas/tone which is more compact but less featureful.
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.
2.2 Bragibooks/m4b-merge
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 clue that it has done so, and there does not seem to be any way to disable this behaviour. One can, at most, merely 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.
All that said, using sloppily-designed power tools that might hurt me is kinda my jam, so I am still using it.
2.3 Audiobookshelf
Audiobookshelf is an open-source self-hosted media server for your audiobooks and podcasts.
2.4 OpenAudible
Openaudible is a transcoding client for Audible books. 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
- handling artwork and chapter markers pretty reliably.
It is the only one that has worked reliably over time, and even added features when others have failed to even continue working. As such, I applaud their efforts. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Historical note: the project was originally open source, and then went closed source. Even though I do not disagree with the decision to charge for the software, (hell, I donated when it was still free) the process could have possibly been handled better, and definitely communicated better. Part of this is a me problem: The various misspellings and glitches, which before it was commercialised seemed to be endearing community glitches and misspellings, now look like unlovely examples of business incompetence. Still, I get that open source software development can be gruelling and it is nice to be compensated reliably. I also get that another underappreciated hard skill in open source software development, apart from writing code, is community management. Maybe there is more to the story than I know here?
I paid for a licence.
2.5 AAXtoMp3
Minimalist audiobook converter. Free. Only just noticed so have not used. 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.
2.6 inAudible
rmcrackan/inAudible: inAudible installers
Among the ffmpeg library’s versatile options is the ability to remove DRM from
.aaand.aaxfiles. 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.
2.7 DRMare
2.8 Noteburner
noteburner is feature-light but seemed to actually work~ not work last time I checked. (Windows/macOS)
2.9 Macsome
Macsome Audiobook/itunes converter (macOS/Windows) is sporadically updated, and had trouble with recent iTunes.
2.10 Tuneskit
tuneskit seemed to not work any longer last time I checked. (macOS/Windows)