Audible to mp3

Audible are having a sale (until tomorrow) where all their books are $9.99. Considering they are often $45 or more and they are often the same price in pounds over here, I thought I’d take a look. I wasn’t able to download the Da Vinci Code as they don’t have the rights to distribute it outside the US (silly ruling). However I did get Soul Music and Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett. I already have a couple of his audio books and they make great listening whilst driving around the country to customer sites. However, somehow I had to get the files into mp3 format….

After a bit of googling, it looked like the answer would be to download goldwave and use this to convert the files, but using an old version of Audible.com’s player as per the instructions here.
However, what I discovered is that the version of Audible Player and goldwave worked ok (as I subsequently found at works for WildDannie21). As long as I ensured that the the player was positioned at the start of the file, by initially playing it in audible player, I was then able to exit audible player, load the .aa file into goldwave, go to Options/File Format and set the default save format to mp3. Then go to Tools/Cue Points/Auto Cue and set the minimum seperation to 5:00:00 – every 5 mins. Then hit split file and save the 5 minute chunks to disk ensuring I use the default save format option. This avoids having to convert the entire file into one huge (653MB) mp3 file (which then refuses to reload and convert in goldwave.)