Export of authorisation file to audible-cli appears to fail (and why)

[Aberdyfi]

Describe the bug

Background: I have two audible accounts. I added the older (pre-amazon) account first. I was offered the opportunity to import my audible-cli authorisation file, which I accepted. That worked beautifully.

Then I authorised my newer amazon account. That also worked beautifully. However, when I exported an authorisation file for use with audible-cli, audible-cli crashed. I am not an expert programmer (I know just enough to appreciate that Libation is a really great program), however inspection of the auth file revealed two possible causes.

1. The second line is "website_cookies": {},. audible-cli seems to prefer "website_cookies": null,. My guess is that this is not the cause.
2. A more substantive issue concerns device_private_key. audible-cli formats this as "-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----\n ... \n-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----\n. (The \n is important here.) In particular, they key itself is broken down by several \n. (Notepad++ displays the \n explicitly. It is not interpreted as a LF.) Each letter group consists of 64 characters except the last.

I did edit the auth file to fix these two issues, but my testing then broke down. (In a nutshell, audible-cli rejected the original auth file because "cookies did not take the expected form". Then it crashed, but that could be because I did not edit the auth file correctly. Specifically, I inexplicably broke the device_private_key into 65-character groups. I did not spot that error and so followed a different route.)

To Reproduce

Steps to reproduce the behavior: Export an auth file from Libation and see if it can be used in audible-cli.

Platform

Using Windows 10 on an oldish Thinkpad.

Log Files

There was no Libation crash. It is just that the import/export function is incredibly helpful.

[rmcrackan]

Thanks for the details. I made a temp release for you. Can you try this and tell me if you're still having issues -- https://github.com/rmcrackan/Libation/actions/runs/23762876045#artifacts

[Aberdyfi]

Sorry about the delay in getting back!

Here is what happened:

1. I can now export the authorisation file for my Pre-Amazon account successfully.
2. I still cannot export my Amazon account, but see the following.

One clue is this. audible-cli natively sets "website_cookies": null for Pre-Amazon accounts, but populates website_cookies for Amazon accounts. (I know this because I have native authorisation files for both types of account.) Why? My understanding is that, about 5 years ago, Audible stopped supplying website_cookies at authorisation. That broke the audible-cli code (which simply assumed that they were present). mkb79 instantly fixed this issue for Pre-Amazon accounts, but it looks like they left Amazon accounts unchanged. (To an amateur like me, that makes a kind of sense: keep all the information that you get at authorisation just in case.) So, in effect, the lack of website_cookies in the exported file is probably causing a minor crash in audible-cli.

As a small test I changed "website_cookies": null to "website_cookies": {}`, but that simply changed the nature of the crash.

I can't help feeling that the way forward here would really be to make audible-cli more robust to the absence of website_cookies, but maybe there is something that I do not understand here. But, even with the minor incompatibility between audible-cli and Libation, the export function in Libation remains very valuable as a piece of future proofing.

[rmcrackan]

I was with you until you mention the null vs {} thing. If audible-api doesn't accept either, then what is it I'm supposed to populate?

I feel like the answer is just to include all of us here. Mkb79 and I have corresponded for years and he's a great guy. This should be easy to fix.

@Aberdyfi : can you get a failing file, carefully strip out all of your PII, and attach it here? It will give me and him a reference point for this conversation.

Summoning @mkb79 :) Per the above thread, something about how I'm exporting website_cookies is not working with your import. Is this something I need to change or you? If me: please advise on how to fix. Note my test release for this user is in my repo ( #1708 ) but not yet in any released version of Libation. After we fix this I'll probably push a new release.

[Aberdyfi]

Thanks for getting back so fast! Sorry about the lack of clarity. I'll stick to the facts on this one.:

1. I exported an auth file for an Amazon account from Libation.
2. When that failed, I thought that I could at least try changing "website_cookies": null into "website_cookies": {}. That did change the crash reported by Python slightly, but I did not investigate further.
3. I am attaching a tentative fail file. I was using Python on a Windows 10 laptop. This may be less than you need, but I am feeling my way on the PII here. (The problem is obviously the public nature of GitHub.)

output 4, for rmcrackan and mkb79.md

[rmcrackan]

Thanks! I opened a ticket on his end too. Hopefully he'll join in and let me know how to alter my output -- mkb79/audible-cli#259

[Aberdyfi]

Wonderful! Thanks!

[mkb79]

I'll look into this and report back!