Patrick Keisler finds a work-around:
Reading the contents of an audit event file can be accomplished using either Management Studio or the T-SQL function, sys.fn_get_audit_file. However, sometimes a customer may want to use a third-party tool to read and aggregate audit records, and some of those tools do not have the ability to read the binary audit file. In that case, the customer will just use sys.fn_get_audit_file to write the audit records to a database and then use the third-party tool to ingest those records from the database.
What if that third-party tool cannot even read from SQL Server? That happened to me recently where the only option was to read from a text-based file.
Read on for Patrick’s solution to the problem and a real pain point you’ll find along the way.