I’ve been a member of Audible.com for more than a year now. I’ve been very happy with the service until today. Now I think I’ll close my account.

For those of you that don’t know, Audible is an audio book retailer. Since I’m busy, I like to listen to books while I drive, clean, etc.

Recently, my computer crashed and I had to reinstall everything. Today I purchased a book and since I had not yet installed the Audible downloader program, I streamed the book directly from the audible site this morning while I went about my routine. Tonight I downloaded the Audible program download and itunes for my ipod and reinstalled them.

Tonight I thought I’d do some cleaning, so I try to listen to the book I bought. Upon trying to listen to my book, I got an error message that basically read, “To cut down on piracy, we only authorize 3 devices to pay your purchases. If you are seeing this message, you must unauthorized one of your devices.” I thought, “Well that’s fucked.” So, I went to the Audible.com site to unauthorized a device. After mucking through the support site, I found that they require that I have access to the offending machine… which is across town. The instructions tell me to call customer service if I don’t have access to machine I wish to unauthorized. So I call… Only to find out that their customer service office is already closed and won’t be open again until Monday. I go back to their site and find their help desk. So I fill out a ticket and submit it. I get an email saying that they will get back to me on Monday.

Since I couldn’t play the download file, I decided to go back to simply streaming it like I did this morning. I download the steaming file and… I get the same goddamn message telling me that the corporation will not allow me access to the content I own because they don’t want me to listen to it using this computer.

At this point I’m calling bullshit.

If I purchase a CD, I can listen to it on any player, computer or in my car. If I purchase the exact same content in a digital download format, I apparently have to deal with Big Corporate Brother telling me what device I can and can’t use. Furthermore, to use the particular device I want, it seems that I have to beg Big Corporate Brother to let me do it… when it’s convenient for them.

This is why people use pirated content. Apparently the way it works is, if I dish out money to buy things the right way, I get to deal with a corporation telling me when, where and how I can use the content I own. If I elect to use pirated content, it’s free and I get to use it wherever and however I like. At this point I’m pissed enough to start looking for copyright busting programs so that I can bust the copyright “protection” on the files I bought so that I can listen to the damn things instead of waiting until Monday morning so that I can call a corporation to get their blessing to listen to the book I paid for.

So, what’s the best program to convert aax files to MP3?