Re: Delicious Library

Jolly Roger <jollyroger@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In article <jvs8o4h2cqb0v0d353nr5g5b3ct0iahshp@xxxxxxx>,
Howard Brazee <howard@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I decided to try Delicious Library. While a majority of my books are
older than scan codes, I want to save work by using its scan code
reader.

I downloaded it and dragged it to Applications (it unzipped to my
desktop). I ran it and it loaded my iTunes library. I'm not sure I
see the advantage of having a copy of what my iTunes already has. But
that's not what I wanted to test.

That must be a newer feature. The version I have doesn't do that. I
purchased Delicious Library a long time ago, back at version 1. Sounds
like a superfluous feature to me, but whatever.

I found the setting to scan the bar code and turned it on. A window
came up with two rectangles in it - but the image is reversed as a
mirror image with either my iMac's iSight and my Logitech camera.

When I tried it first, nothing happened, so I selected Help - to find
out that help is not available for library. It doesn't make sense
that that's because I haven't yet paid for it - I need to think it
will work before I pay for it.

I kept trying moving the book around and after a while it whistled.
Then I heard it mention a completely different book. I kept trying
and it whistled again, but this time it did not find what it thought
it scanned.

Am I doing something wrong, or will I need to save up for an expensive
scanner before this program will be useful to me?

I can tell you that older versions of the application worked fairly
well, but were always *extremely* slow - including scanning. You have to
hold the item very steadily while waiting for the application to grab a
picture of the bar code. And it is fairly sensitive to distance and
lighting conitions. So you may find you need to *slowly* change the
position of the item in relationship with the camera until it gets a
good image. If you practice this with a few different items, angles,
distances, and so on, you'll find the approximate sweet spot.

Older versions also are prone to occasional SQLite database corruption
and bloat, which causes the application to slow down even more (if you
can imagine that!). The only recourse for this seems to be sending the
database files to Delicious Monster so they can works some SQLite magic
on them and return them to you in seemingly better working condition.

I've read horrible reviews about newer versions of the application on
Mac software review web sites such as <http://macupdate.com> and
<http://versiontracker.com>. Delicious Monster wants to charge an
upgrade fee for the new version. So we haven't upgraded our copy.

We use ours only to catalogue our collection of DVDs. Very few of the
DVDs we scan are unable to be read by the camera (I can count them on
one hand - out of almost a thousand so far). When that happens we just
type in the numbers of the bar code instead. For DVDs, the application
gets its information from Amazon, I believe. Fewer than 1% of the DVDs
we scan are unable to be found in the Amazon database. For those we just
search by name, and it finds them that way.

We don't use ours for books. Books may be a different story -
particularly older books.

I've had no problems with v1 or v2 other than some slowness in v1 and
scanning being a bit hit and miss using an iSight in v1 & 2. I can't
blame failure to find an item in Amazon on Library. I just enter the
half dozen important bits of info by hand using the time saved when
scanning and Amazon lookup does work - which in my case is about 50% of
the time with my books, CDs and games. But that low success rate is
because I have a lot that pre-date Amazon.

Library has always seemed like excellent software to me, and if you want
reliable barcode scanning there's nothing stopping the more serious user
buying an actual barcode scanner. Serious users who do this tell me it
works fantastically.
--
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
.

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