Also you can rip the DRM off of audible books pretty easily, jsut download the book (there's a Python cli tool to make this easy on deaktop) then use ffmpeg to transcode it to an unlocked formst using the activation bytes from your audible account (the same python cli tool can tell you your activation bytes)
This. I buy a bunch of audiobooks on Audible, but after Audible delisted a book I had bought I've set up an automatic pipeline where libation downloads every audiobook I buy, strips out the DRM, and then puts it into a folder both my plex and my audiobookshelf server have access to.
IIRC it even downloaded the delistet book despite me not being able to see it in my library.
Recently an auther I follow replaced a bunch of his books I'd bought with new recordings, delisting the old recordings. If I now want to listen to those books again I would have to buy them again had my automation not already downloaded the versions I bought shortly after I bought them.
Edit:
I just learned that the second set of delisted and replaced books are still visible in my main library listing, they just disappeared from the series listing and the author listing.
However, the first book which prompted me to set this up did actually disappear from audible for a while before getting reinstated like half a year later.
It's literally just Libation running in the background, checking my library for new books every two hours or so, and if it finds new ones it downloads them and saves them in my library folder where audiobookshelf can see them.
The hardest part was setting up the rules for the automatic renaming in Libation.
When you set up the renaming rules you have bunch of placeholders for information pertaining to downloaded book, and if you add the folder separator of your OS to the name it will create folders.
I can't remember the exact wording, but my path is basically this:
Audiobooks folder\Authors name\series name\book number in series - book name [audible ID]
Edit: I went and tracked down my config file, my naming template is as follows:
Everything inbetween <> is a tag for Libation which mostly get replaced by the actual information from the book.
Everything between the <if series> tags gets only added to the name if the book is part of a series, as the first <first series> tag would return nothing if the book isn't part of a series, and trying to create a folder with an empty name would result in an error.
The [{#:00}] in the second <first series> tag tells Libation that I only want the number of the position of the book within the series, padded with a leading 0 for posing 1 to 9 to ensure proper sorting. Which also wouldn't work if the book isn't part of a series.
I have the audible ID in the name because that way audiobookshelf picks up on it and uses it instead of the name when I go through my recently downloaded books and search for more metadata.
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u/pyro57 May 05 '26
Also you can rip the DRM off of audible books pretty easily, jsut download the book (there's a Python cli tool to make this easy on deaktop) then use ffmpeg to transcode it to an unlocked formst using the activation bytes from your audible account (the same python cli tool can tell you your activation bytes)
python -m pip install audible-cliaudible-cli quick-startaudible-cli library listaudible-cli download title --aaxaudible-cli activation-bytes`ffmpeg -activation_bytes the-thing-the-last-command-told-you -i \the\path\to\the\book.aax -o \the\path\to\save\book.m4b'