Audible Books and Garmin 660/665

For everything Garmin Zumo 660/665 related
Post Reply
carolinarider09
Posts: 270
Joined: Sat Jul 21, 2018 12:40 am
Location: South Carolina
Has liked: 24 times
Been liked: 35 times
United States of America

Audible Books and Garmin 660/665

Post by carolinarider09 »

Does anyone still listen to books from Audible on their GPS?

I am having problems downloading a book I just purchased to put on my GPS
carolinarider09
Posts: 270
Joined: Sat Jul 21, 2018 12:40 am
Location: South Carolina
Has liked: 24 times
Been liked: 35 times
United States of America

Re: Audible Books and Garmin 660/665

Post by carolinarider09 »

Ok,,, The answer is that Audible no longer supports anything to do with Garmin. And, they only support downloads of their books using their software and it only runs under Windows 10.

So, if you want to use audible books on your GPS you will need to be running Windows 10 on your computer and you will only be able to listen to the books as MP3 files.

Unless.........

Audible books are encoded in a proprietary format that was agreed to with Garmin for use on their GPS (at least that is what I have found out doing my research). The Audible Manager program's job was to take that downloaded file (in the AAX format) and convert it for use in the Garmin GPS's Audio Books app which includes the identification of chapters. It is this "chapters" feature that turns out to be the issued.

So.... when I tired to download my new audio book purchases this last Sunday, the download program "failed". After a long heated discussion with the Audible "Leadership" team rep, I was told that as of some time since June 22, 2020, Audible no longer supports downloads via Audible Manager and you can only download the books using a program that runs under Windows 10.

Since I do not intend, at least today, to run Windows 10 on any of my computers I looked for away to get around Audible's new controls.

There is a way, it turns out to be a simple way, to do this.

I will update this post with that method after I complete the downloads of all my purchased books. That will take some time but.....
carolinarider09
Posts: 270
Joined: Sat Jul 21, 2018 12:40 am
Location: South Carolina
Has liked: 24 times
Been liked: 35 times
United States of America

Re: Audible Books and Garmin 660/665

Post by carolinarider09 »

Ok,,,, It appears that what Audible Manager was designed to do was to add the chapter markings to the books. In other words, when you use the Audible Manager program's download system, the program downloads the book to your Audible Manager storage area and adds the chapters.

If you look at the file name you will see its really different.

Ok, so, I firmly think that the fact that I have Audible Manager running under Windows 7 on my MacBook (using VMWare emulation software) prevents me from just downloading the books to my Windows program. It must realize what the file is and when I try to download the book (running Firefox), it uses the Audible download which fails because Audible has set it up to fail (will not allow the download to take place).

However, it turns out you do not need to use the Audible program system to download the books and the only difference between the native format download and the Audible Manager format is the chapters.
Post Reply