This script eases the process of downloading the audio files from Chirp Audiobooks.
It uses the browsers console to generate a list of URLs, and then provides a list of curl
or wget
commands to download them.
Tested with Firefox + Terminal on MacOS, and Firefox + PowerShell on Windows 10.
As an aside, I want to give a shout out to Libro.fm for providing a simple download button for each purchase. Then you don't need a script like this!
- Find the book in your Chirp Library.
- If you've already listened to it, you may need to move it back from your Archive.
- Click the book to open Chirp's web player.
- Open the browser's Web Developer Tools.
- Copy-paste the
script.js
contents into the console and press [enter]. - Initiate the script:
- If the book is already at the start, click Play (▶).
- If the book is on any other track, open the Chapters menu (top left) and select the first Track.
- Wait while the script advances through each track; it's saving the URLs in the background.
- It may say "There was an error loading your audiobook, please reload the page." under the Play button, ignore this.
- It may also show a number of URLs in red in the console, along with a warning after each one. Ignore these also.
- When it reaches the final track, the script will show a list of commands on the screen in a white box.
- Click once to highlight the complete list.
- Copy-paste it to a command line (Terminal, Power Shell, etc.) and press [enter] to execute it.
- Some command lines will begin executing immediately, however you still need to press [enter] to execute the final command.
- Once the commands finish, you should have a new folder with a cover image and each of the tracks as .m4a files.
- On macOS, type
open .
and press [enter] to view the files. - On Windows, type
explorer .
and press [enter] to view the files.
- On macOS, type
- Check the file size of each track:
- If any are 0 bytes, the download URL may have expired.
- In that case, go through the process again, but in step 7, first paste the commands into a text editor and delete everything except for the ones to download the 0-byte files.
- If any are 0 bytes, the download URL may have expired.
Enjoy!
I believe the GNU website only serves up source code, not a compiled executable that you can just install and use. You could go that route, but it's the hard way, and I'm not even sure I could guide you through all of the steps. (Also, I think the
.sig
file is just a signature that can be used to verify the download wasn't corrupted.)To install wget, you should follow the steps I outlined earlier. Homebrew is a package manager that that installs other software for you, and it provides a compiled version of wget that works on macos.