.aa to MP3 conversion

[rafletcher]

I've got hold of a Sony MP3 player, of a type my wife can manage to listen to audio books whilst in bed - it helps stave off her insomnia.  However the majority of content that we have is Audibles .aa format - and Sony / Audible don't play with each other. So I'd like to convert the .aa files to mp3, if possible without having to use iTunes to burn an audio CD first.

Has anyone done this? I've done the obvious Google search, but a personal recommendation of a safe download / easy conversion is always better 

[Biggsy]

I've wanted to do the same, but I've failed to find a converter that can do it in faster than real time (by simply recording playback).  That's not to say there isn't one.  Hopefully someone else will help us both.  I'm not keen on using Audbile again, meanwhile.

Incidentally, your player is likely to support .Ogg as well as .MP3 if it's modern.  .Ogg (Vorbis) has a better quality to file size ratio.

[rafletcher]

Nope, its  a Sony NWZ and no ogg support, but hey, once I have mp3 files it's a work of moments to swap them around.

I've found this....

http://titankeysoftware.com/tutorials/audible_aa_to_mp3.html

..which I may have a play with.

[pdm]

I have been an Audible subscriber for some time and, quite frankly, hate it - they refuse to support a Linux client and I have therefore to maintain a Windo$e client just to use them. The books are good, though.

I have tried various conversion systems - none of the "free" ones work properly. The last one I settled on and have used successfully was http://audials.com. It is not expensive. This uses a virtual CD system to convert the files and usually works OK.

(click to show/hide)

The other way to go is to buy the book on Audible and then download it ready converted from another place.

[rafletcher]

Does that require iTunes to be installed? I mean using Audials not the other suggestion (which I don't actually understand  )

[pdm]

No, Audials is "standalone". iTunes not needed. I found some later versions of iTunes did not work anyway, though not tried it recently.

[rafletcher]

Well I downloaded Audials One - and when I tried to convert a .aa file it immediately said I had to install iTunes in order to convert audio books.

[rafletcher]

In the end I paid £25 for Tuneskit's DRM removale tool for the Mac (they do a Windows one as well). It still requires the .aa / .aax files to be imported into iTunes, which I could only do file by file (ie individually rather than as a block), but once in all I had to do was use the "add" option in the Tuneskit software, and select all the files I wanted to convert, and start it. It then ran in background at about 5 minutes per file (or 5 minutes per 6hrs playing time) so quite fast. After that it was a drag and drop onto the Sony Walkman. No chapters, but then thats how the Audible files come anyway, just a single block.