Notices

Greetings!

I have installed Panucci the audiobook player on my N900 and my N900 is connected via USB cable in PC Suite Mode. Hooray! Audible Manager has detected the N900. However, all my audiobooks are in Format 4. When I try to drag them to the device, Audible Manager says:

Audio programs in Format 4 are not supported by N900 (PC-Suite Mode). Those programs were not added to your transfer list. N900 (PC-Suite Mode) supports audio only in Format 2 and Format 3.

Is this info provided by Panucci? Does Panucci support Format 4? Is there another way to get the audio books onto the N900 so I can try them out in Panucci?

Any tips on getting the N900 with Panucci to work with Audible Manager from Audible.com would be appreciated.

Thanks so much and Happy New Year!

Did you try using Format 3? Do the files play in the N900?
You can re-download your audiobooks from your Audible library in multiple formats and multiple times. It would be great if Format 3 actually works.

First I tried copying all the .aa files in Format 4 to the N900 using USB Mass Storage Mode. Panucci would not play them (just did nothing). Media Player would say "unsupported media type" or words to that effect.

Then I re-downloaded one of the files in Format 3. Audible Manager was happy now to transfer it to the N900 in PC-Suite Mode. It put the file in:

/N900/Data/Audible

But Panucci still does nothing when it tries to open the file.d Media Player now says "Playback error" which I suppose is an improvement. Now I'm thinking there is a DRM issue and I need to "activate" the N900 with Audible.com. Audible Manager says I need to go online with the phone to do it, so that's what I'm going to do next.

Going online with the phone didn't help. Audible.com doesn't list the N900. How the Audible Manager on my laptop seemed to recognize the N900 and its capabilities in PC-Suite Mode is a mjystery.

Yeah, it looks like it's a DRM issue. Too bad.
I haven't been able to ever play Audible files in Ubuntu either.

Who ever said Audible worked with Panucci? That would be news to me, and I care!

On the N810, Audible works fine with the Garnet Palm emulator, and they are saying that the Garnet thing works with the N900, so I have hopes for it. It works in format 2 or 3, as I recall.

If you look around at the Alternative area, you will find a discussion of Audible over there.

You supposedly can play Audible Manager using Wine, so that might solve the Ubuntu problem, but the Palm emulator seems to be the best hope for N900 users.

Edit: here's that Audible thread I mentioned.

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=35326

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that Audible works with Panucci...just thought I'd try it to see (hoping). It appears it doesn't.

Thanks, I checked it out. I do have the Garnet VM installed, so it's a tempting option.

Panucci uses GStreamer for playback and therefore does not support any more DRM than the "stock" media player does.

You can still play non-DRM'ed audiobooks by buying them on CD and ripping them into MP3s or by getting them from another source like http://librivox.org/

Unfortunately, I tried a zillion things and couldn't get it to work. I will keep my N800 handy; it works perfectly on that!

I hope that someone can figure out how to fix it. There are a few of us with big Audible collections and I'm one.

DRM screws legitimate customers once again. Big surprise here.