Libation: Liberate your Library

Audible audiobook manager

The good

• Import library from audible, including cover art
• Download and remove DRM from all books
• Download accompanying PDFs
• Add tags to books for better organization
• Powerful advanced search built on the Lucene search engine
• Customizable saved filters for common searches
• Open source
• Tested on US Audible only. Should theoretically also work for Canada, UK, Germany, and France

The bad

• Windows only
• Several known speed/performance issues
• Made by a programmer, not a designer so the goals are function rather than beauty. And it shows

The ugly

• Documentation? Yer lookin' at it
• This is a single-developer personal passion project. Support, response, updates, enhancements, bug fixes etc are as my free time allows
• I have a full-time job, a life, and a finite attention span. Therefore a lot of time can potentially go by with no improvements of any kind

Disclaimer: I've made every good-faith effort to include nothing insecure, malicious, anti-privacy, or destructive. That said: use at your own risk.

I made this for myself and I want to share it with the great programming and audible/audiobook communiites which have been so generous with their time and help.

Getting started

Import your library

Select Import > Scan Library:

You'll see this window while it's scanning:

Success! We see how many new titles are imported:

Download your books -- DRM-free!

Automatically download some or all of your audible books. This shows you how much of your library is not yet downloaded and decrypted:

Select Liberate > Begin Book Backups

First the original book with DRM is downloaded

Then it's decrypted so you can use it on any device you choose. The very first time you decrypt a book, this step will take a while. Every other book will go much faster. The first time, Libation has to figure out the special decryption key which allows your personal books to be unlocked.

And voila! If you have multiple books not yet liberated, Libation will automatically move on to the next.

Download PDF attachments

For books which include PDF downloads, Libation can download these for you as well and will attempt to store them with the book

Select Liberate > Begin PDF Backups

The downloads work just like with books, only with no additional decryption needed.

Ta da!

Details of downloaded files

When you set up Libation, you'll specify a Books directory. Libation looks inside that directory and all subdirectories to look for files or folders with each library book's audible id. This way, organization is completely up to you. When you download + decrypt a book, you get several files

• .m4b: your audiobook in m4b format. This is the most pure version of your audiobook and retains the highest quality. Now that it's decrypted, you can play it on any audio player and put it on any device. If you'd like, you can also use 3rd party tools to turn it into an mp3. The freedom to do what you want with your files was the original inspiration for Libation.
• .cue: this is a file which logs where chapter breaks occur. Many tools are able to use this if you want to split your book into files along chapter lines.
• .nfo: This is just some general info about the book and includes some technical stats about the audiofile.