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I'm trying to get lots of audio I can fall asleep to and has content I find interesting/want to learn

I have some audiobooks through my amazon audible account.

For one of those books, at the start of each chapter, the creators of the audiobook put a loud jingle sound at the start of each chapter to signify the new chapter- this jingle wakes me up.

What is your software recommendation to be able to get the audio and remove parts of it? I don't know if audible let's you download the sound files exactly so what is my best bet?

I'm always looking for new audio content to fall asleep to and if I could figure this out, it would expand the amount of content I could use for this purpose massively and be a big game changer for me

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    Have you thought of complaining to the Audible creator(s) &/or putting a negative review on Amazon with this as the issue - if enough people do so then they may release a modified version & change their habits. AFIAK the licence conditions say that you shouldn't even try to modify the audio book content yourself.
    – Steve Barnes
    Nov 18, 2016 at 6:34

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Update: As of 06/13, I can confirm that the Tuneskit Audible Converter is able to decrypt Audible audiobooks without using the analog loophole. I set it up on a system without the components necessary to play audio, and the process worked perfectly. It is very quick, and seems to preserve all quality without increasing the file size. Once the files are decrypted, they can be edited using any standard program.

(I cannot confirm whether the software is truly lossless without a control for comparison, but it works more than well enough for me to feel comfortable recommending it. By comparison, software that re-records media is always slow, destructive, finicky, and generally not worth anyone's time.)

Where possible, I still encourage buying from DRM-Free Audiobook stores, so that decryption will not be a problem in the first place. In my experience, Downpour.com and Audiobooksnow.com have a very good combined catalog, as well as competitive membership prices.

My original answer is below...

Unfortunately, there is no software that can edit books purchased from Audible.

Audible audiobooks are heavily DRM'd, and they cannot be decrypted except via exploiting the analog loophole, which is time consuming and reduces audio quality.

(The only semi-exception is when an Audible book is purchased through Apple's iTunes Store—in this case, the book will use Apple's Fairplay DRM instead of Audible's custom solution, and Fairplay can be removed via a program called Requiem.)

In the future, consider purchasing audiobooks from DRM-Free stores such as Downpour.com (Everything is DRM-Free except rentals) or Audiobooksnow.com (most titles are DRM-Free, but check for a "Downloadable" icon before purchasing to make sure).

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    How bad is their DRM? Can't you extract they key from their player software? Or does it constantly phone home?
    – einpoklum
    Nov 18, 2016 at 17:42
  • Bad enough that no one has cracked it, or if they have, they haven't made the solution public. I've looked into this EXTENSIVELY in the past. The most you can do is re-record the audio (aka use the analog loophole). It's why I no longer buy books from Audible—or, when a book really isn't available anywhere else, why I pay twice the price to buy it through iTunes as a last resort.
    – Wowfunhappy
    Nov 18, 2016 at 18:59
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Well, I haven't tried it, but this Windows app claims to be able to remove the DRM.

Also, have a look at a similar question on unix.SX (caveat: that was asked 3 years ago.)

Edit: It seems what all of these are doing is picking up the audio after it has been converted from digital to analog (using the "analog loophole"), so you lose quality. Still, it might be worth it.

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    That application (and others like it) are exploiting the analog loophole; ie, playing the whole book and re-recording it. This takes a long time and reduces audio quality. Burning the audiobooks to a CD (real or virtual) also works, but it's is much the same process—you're uncompressing the audio and re-encoding it.
    – Wowfunhappy
    Nov 18, 2016 at 18:57
  • @Wowfunhappy: True, and still - it's a concrete app which does what the user asked for, albeit imperfectly.
    – einpoklum
    Nov 18, 2016 at 19:05

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