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Jun 2018

Overcast + Audible

Audible is a fine place to buy audio books, but Audible’s iOS app is no match for the listening experience of Overcast. Overcast does a hell-uv-a job trimming silences and pitch shifting audio to sound natural with sped-up playback.

What lies beneath are theoretical directions to get Audible books into Overcast.

!!!Warning!!! it costs money, this is iOS macOS specific, you may be breaking some laws if you do this.

This method should work for any podcast player that lets you import podcast feeds via RSS.

How to download your books

Audible allows you, at the time of writing, to download the books you have purchased.

  1. Login to Audible.com
  2. Go to Library>My Books to see your books
  3. Select Download next to the book you want

How to convert AAX files to MP3s

  1. Download TunesKit Audible Audiobook Converter
  2. Add your files to TunesKit (this will likely add them to iTunes and ask you to authorize Audible with iTunes)
  3. Convert the .aax file to .mp3 using

If you get lost they have documentation.

Option 1 - Overcast

If you subscribe to Overcast you can upload your new .mp3 file to the website. From there you can access this file in Overcast assuming you are logged in to the same Overcast account in both website and app.

Note you can only upload files that are under 1GB in size and no more than 2GB total.

Option 2 - RSS Feed

If the space limitations of Overcast upload are a blocker you need to build your own podcast rss feed for Overcast to consume.

This does take some command line and web development experience, or at least willingness to tinker. At a high-level we will install a tool to generate an RSS feed and then you need to publish that feed on a web server.

Make the feed

  1. Install dropcaster
    1. Open Terminal.app
    2. Change to the right folder in Terminal.app by running cd ~/Path/to/your/files
    3. Run gem install dropcaster in Terminal.app
  2. Make a channel.yml file (example below)
    1. Run touch channel.yml in Terminal.app
    2. Open channel.yml in a text editor and add the example
    3. Adjust the file to your own title, description, url
  3. Run dropcaster on the command line to create your podcast feed
    1. Run dropcaster > index.rss in Terminal.app

Example channel.yml

:title: 'My Audio Books'
:description: 'My personal set of audio books'
:url: 'https://yoursite.com'

Upload to server

Your newly created feed must live on the internet somewhere if Overcast is going to consume the feed. This tutorial isn’t about setting up a web server. But you will need to:

  1. Upload files to a web server
  2. Import the https://yoursite.com/index.rss into your podcast player

One small gotcha is that audio book files can be large which prevents most free hosting solutions. My best recommendation would be a DigitalOcean Droplet mostly because they have lots of documentation to help.

Note for your podcast url in the channel.yaml you can use the IP address of your server or droplet. You do not need to buy a domain name.

In closing

I hope this theoretical example of how to get Audible audio books into a podcast feed was interesting. I do not recommend you try this since it likely breaks some agreement you have with Audible.

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