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Backing up your Audible library

What this is​

The manager includes a full Audible backup tool (in the spirit of Libation or OpenAudible): it signs in to your Audible account, lists the audiobooks you've bought, downloads them, removes Audible's DRM using your own account's per-book keys, and places the resulting ordinary M4B files into a library on your server - where any AudioSilo player (or anything else that plays M4B) can use them.

:::warning For your own use only This exists to let you preserve audiobooks you bought, on your own equipment, for your own listening - the same books your account is licensed for, decrypted with your account's own keys. It does not remove DRM from anything you don't own, and the results are for personal use, not for redistribution. :::

You'll need ffmpeg 4.4 or newer installed (it does the DRM removal). If it's missing, the import fails immediately with a message telling you so - on macOS, brew install ffmpeg fixes it.

One Audible account per library​

Audible is set up per library: open a server's Libraries list and choose Manage → Audible on the library you want to back up into. Each library can use a different Audible account (handy for households). The library also needs its host path set, since backups land there like any other import.

Signing in to Audible​

  1. Pick your marketplace - the Audible storefront your account lives on (us, uk, de, fr, ca, it, au, in, jp, es, br).
  2. Click Log in to Audible. Your normal web browser opens Amazon's real sign-in page - the manager never sees your password, and any two-factor prompts happen in the browser as usual.
  3. After you finish signing in, Amazon lands on a page that looks broken - it may say "Looking for something?" / "page not found", or appear blank. That's expected. What matters is the address bar: it now starts with https://www.amazon.<domain>/ap/maplanding?….
  4. Copy that entire URL from the address bar, paste it into the Redirect URL field in the manager, and click Complete login.

The manager registers itself as a device on your account and stores the resulting credentials on your computer, encrypted with a key held in your operating system's keychain. Log out removes them.

Your library, cross-checked against the server​

Once signed in, the Backup tab loads your owned Audible books and immediately cross-checks them against the server library.

The Audible backup tab: owned books split into To import and Already on server, with destinations

  • Books are split into To import, Already on server, and All tabs, so you can see at a glance what a backup would actually fetch.
  • Matching is automatic - by Audible ID where the server knows it, otherwise by a tolerant author/series/title comparison. When a fuzzy match is confirmed, the manager quietly records the book's Audible ID on the server, so future checks are exact.
  • The Destination column shows where each new book would land, using the same auto or template placement as a manual import.
  • Got a wrong or missing match? Match… on the row lets you point the book at the right item on the server (or clear a manual match).

Backing up: what actually happens​

Tick the books you want and click Import N selected. For each book, in order:

  1. Download - the manager requests that book's license from Audible (which includes the book's decryption key, tied to your account) and downloads the protected file, with a live progress bar.
  2. Remove DRM - ffmpeg decrypts it using that key. This is a lossless repackage, not a re-encode: the audio bytes are untouched, and chapters, book metadata, and the cover image are all kept. The result is a standard .m4b.
  3. Transfer - the M4B is placed into the library at its planned destination (over SFTP or local copy, atomically and size-verified, like any import).
  4. Clean up - the encrypted download is deleted the moment it's decrypted, and the temporary M4B is deleted once it's safely on the server. Only the placed copy remains.

Books already on the server are skipped automatically. When everything finishes, the manager triggers one library rescan and waits for it, so the books appear in your player right away; the summary spells out anything that failed, per book, so you can retry just those.

Downloads are staged in a temporary folder inside the manager's data directory - transient copies never pass through your library folder.

Beyond backup​

The same Audible view offers two more tools, covered in Organizing and importing books: