Audible audiobooks have been designed to be enjoyed solely in official Audible software players, be them installed on your smartphone or your computer. Epubor Audible Converter gives you the possibility of listening to your lawfully acquired Audible books anywhere by removing all those limitations and converting them into formats that you can listen to on your favorite mobile device or your car.
Audible books come in their own proprietary format, typically AA and AAX (Enhanced Audio, a higher-quality audio codec) audio files, with a quality ranging from 8 to 64 Kbps. You can only load and listen to these books in Audible’s own software players, which for a number of their subscribers may be good enough. Others would love to put it on a USB stick or burn them to an audio CD and read them in a wide variety of different platforms. To make that possible, first you have to convert those AA and AAX files into standard formats, such as MP3, WAV, FLAC, or AAC, and that’s what Epubor Audible Converter does.
The program is extremely simple and easy to use. Actually, it is so simple that one misses a bit of feedback here and there, especially when you load your first few books on the program’s interface. It then launches an automatic process that you later learn to be an initial decryption process required for the subsequent conversion tasks. Your first reaction, though, is to see if the format selected at the bottom side of the screen is the one you need, in case the program’s already converting your books without following your instructions. Once the books appear as “decrypted”, you can select any of the ten formats supported, which will be applied to all the books on the conversion lists. Therefore, if you require different output formats for different files, you’re advised to load your books in different batches, one per format.
Note that the decryption process includes a conversion process as well, one that Epubor Audible Converter needs internally to be able to convert from there to your desired output format. It has already created an M4B file, i.e., an MPEG-4 Audio Book file. This will be added to your selected output folder and will be left there until you decide to remove it to recover valuable disk space. Note, however, that M4B is the only of all the formats supported that will keep information about the location of the original chapters. All the others will produce a single flat file for the entire book with no chapter information whatsoever, so it might turn out not to be so useless after all.
The program supports a nice combination of lossy and lossless formats. I regret to say that you won’t be able to decide the level of quality of the output file, as no quality settings are available. Knowing the quality of the original Audible files, though, chances are that whatever format you choose for the output will, at least, match that of the original. Actually, except for WAV, which is the format you need to burn your audiobooks to disc, I fail to see the point in including others like FLAC and AIFF, which will produce audio files of the same audio quality as the original Audible files but ten times bigger.
All in all, Epubor Audible Converter is a tool worth having if you find the terms of your Audible subscription too restrictive and decide to do something about it on your own responsibility. It will free up your audiobooks and will let you enjoy them on many other platforms in no time. It would be nice to see a higher level of flexibility and a bit more interaction with the user in future versions, though.
Comments (1)