audible-cli VS AAXClean

mkb79 created a powerful python app with access to the full audible api. Special shout out to him because he's single handedly done more to reverse engineer the non-public audible api than the rest of us combined.

This: https://github.com/KrumpetPirate/AAXtoMP3 + your audible key (that you can get from https://github.com/mkb79/audible-cli) is all you need.

I personally use audible-cli to download files from audible and AAXtoMP3 to decrypt them. Don't know anything about Kobo. audible-cli: https://github.com/mkb79/audible-cli AAXtoMP3: https://github.com/KrumpetPirate/AAXtoMP3

I use a combination of this for downloading https://github.com/mkb79/audible-cli

this command line program is available if you're ok with not having a GUI

One user created a plugin for my app. With these you are able to import your audible library data to Goodreads. Take a look here for more information.

For less convenient but powerful command line, there's this one, also free and open source.

It's definitely possible but I don't know of an easy way. There's a python audible api and a CLI wrapper for it. You can search this documentation page for "sample". Those are the api calls which will give you the url of the sample clip's audio file.

If you don't mind the lack of graphical interface there's also a cross platform python library with a CLI layer. It's not as intuitive to use but it's very powerful.

Mostly true. Audible files are aax or aaxc, which are encrypted m4b files. Years ago, Libation originally downloaded this aaxc file then decrypted it using ffmpeg, resulting in the original m4b file. These days Libation uses AaxClean to decrypt as it downloads, with no intermediate step. To get an mp3, yes, it's an additional conversion step. AaxClean does this too.