I like owning physical or actual copies of the things I buy, where I can enjoy them at any time, place, and mode of consumption I choose. With that in mind, I tried converting my Audible AAX files into M4B files so I can listen to them on any app or device I want. To get started, here’s what I used
- FFmpeg which includes FFprobe – for getting the file info then convertiion
- Rainbow crack tables – to get
Fiirst we’ll need to get the checksum of the AAX file you want to convert using FFprobe
C:\>ffprobe.exe sample.aax
You should see the checksum value after running the command similar to the image above. We will need the checksum value to get the activation byte value we need to convert the AAX files, we can do this by using the rainbow crack
C:\tables>run\rcrack.exe ..\ -h efdd8b536f9dadf8ebae0acb38f6f20613d6be15
Now that we have the activation byte code, in this example b9f32538 we can convert the AAX file into m4b. Note that you can convert it to any other format like FLAC or MP3, I just prefer M4B as it preserves the chapters and it’s a faster conversion.
ffmpeg.exe -y -activation_bytes b9f32538 -i ".\input.aax" -codec copy "output.m4b"Then, rinse and repeat for your other purchased books.