Delicious Library



Last week Chris tipped me off to a new program for cataloguing your collection of media. It’s called Delicious Library, from Delicious Monster, and it creates databases for your books, DVDs, CDs and video games. It’s got some great features that put it head and shoulders above the other DVD organizing programs I’ve looked at. First of all, it’s great looking, with a very attractive interface and a clever display scheme that puts the cover art for each entry on to a virtual model of the media and displays them all on wooden shelves. Secondly, and this is primarily why I was willing to go through the trouble of re-entering my collection even though I was already using DVDAttache, Delicious Library lets you scan barcodes using your iSight (or other webcam) and fills in all the information from Amazon’s database, including cover art. It works quite well, unlike that CueCat barcode reader that was all the rage for two minutes back in 2000 until people realized what a piece of junk it was. Thirdly it offers a terrific system for keeping track of items you’ve lent to other people.



There are a few downsides too. I tried exporting my former collection to XML and importing it into Delicious Library and for some reason only a fraction of the DVD records transferred over – oddly enough, only my oldest DVDs. This version is also a 1.0 release (it came out last week), with occasional buggy moments that have resulted in stuff I’ve added not being in the database the next time I boot it up. I’ve determined that one of these bugs is almost certainly because there are some graphics in the “editorial review” on Amazon for the Star Wars Trilogy DVD set, and the program tries to import that review for the “details” portion of it’s entry but errors out because of the graphics in what should be a text field. (Note: Since I wrote that sentence, they've fixed the graphics problem with version 1.0.5) These problems are very minor, however.

Delicious Library is $40, and is only available for Mac OS X. Then again, I tend to envision anyone using Windows as being far too busy dealing with ensdless varieties of file infector viruses, boot sector viruses, network viruses, back door viruses, corrupted macros, worms, Trojan horses, spyware, adware, and malware to actually watch DVDs, let alone worry about cataloging them.

(Hate mail in 3... 2... 1...)

Posted: Thu - November 18, 2004 at      

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