Plugin ideas... add yours here

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by soundneedy

Hi everyone, I've been using Calibre to organize my sound plugin library:

What I (and possibly entire sound design / music production community) would love to see is Calibre plugin for sound databasing. It's something really missing because of such a niche target audience, and if someone is able to create this, would be a superstar among musician types.


The only difference / point of this is to have the functionality of in-library playback in the inspector / "book details" pane.

Being able to preview the waveform and scrub through it audiably, along with things like automatic duration detection, kbps, bit depth, stereo / mono channel count.

It should allow Calibre to accept industry standard audio files, WAV, AIFF, OGG, MP3, MP4, with higher bit depths.

Usually folder structure doesn't matter to DAW (audio production software), it can read a folder structure with sound files and just import them, but for human readability, if it could force Calibre to organize the actual folder structure by something that would resemble Author > Collection > Custom meta > Custom sub meta etc it would be amazing.

@soundneedy - sorry no one has answered this.

Firstly, the folder structure of a calibre library is fixed - ie \library\author\book (nnn)\. It cannot and will probably never be changed, there are many discussions on the issue, but here's the 'official' statement ==>> Want to change the folder structure of the Calibre library?, in particular have a read of what's behind the spoiler and the link to the FAQ

You can store any file type in calibre, but adding non-ebook file types (foreign files) is a bit harder. One restriction is you can only have one instance of a given file type - i.e. one flac, one mp4 etc. I doubt that's going to change any time soon. But there are a number of workarounds people have developed to overcome that.

There are three ways to go about adding foreign files - from hardest to easiest they are:

a) use the Add->Add Empty book to create a book entry with an author and title. and then use the Add->Add files to selected book to add files to that book. the file selector dialogue has a button that is set to the only show ebook file types (MOBI, EPUB, etc) but if you click on that button you should be able to change it to all files - now you can select any file type - eg an MP4

b) this only works on Windows - put a shortcut to calibre.exe in your Send To folder, right click a file (eg an MP4) and select Send To->calibre.exe

c) drag the file (eg the MP4) over to the calibre book list and drop it there.

If you want to merge different file types (eg a flac, an ogg and an MP4) into one 'book' (because they are the same thing) there's a merge option to make that easier, its best to do it before adding metadata.

So now you have an MP4 in a library, what can you do with it? You can view (play) it in whatever program you have set up for opening MP4 files - so that might be FLV. There's an optional calibre PI that I suspect you might make use of - its called Open With - you can configure it to start different programs for different file types - so you might configure an entry to pass MP4 files to Audacity, and other entry to give MP4 files to Reaper etc etc.

I'll be honest, I doubt anyone is going to put their hand up and offer to develop any specialised plugins targeted at sound engineers unless they happen to be one. But that said it's surprisingly 'easy' to a bend calibre to manage things other than ebooks, and to integrate it with other software.

I reckon that's enough for now, feel free to ask questions, either via a PM or maybe start a own thread in the main forum - this ones a bit of a backwater.

Oh, and welcome to Mobileread and apologies again for the delay in responding.

Cheers BR

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by cam.wieland

Sorry if something like this exists, but I've been looking around and haven't seen it:

I have a massive number of pdfs and ebooks on my computer (academic journals and things) and I'd like to save space by moving them to an external drive, but still be able to search for them in some sort of more sophisticated way than a text file with their names.

Is there/could there be some sort of plugin that allows for this? Maybe saves the titles and metadata for searching, but with a note that they're on a different (*and not always plugged in) drive?

Thanks!

I think you can do what you want without any plugins. As I interpret your post what you want is to have a shadow of your library on your system drive. By a shadow I mean the catalogue - ie what you see in the book list, but not the format files (PDFs etc). This is doable - the catalogue (metadata) is held in a database file, its always named metadata.db, and it lives at the top level of all library folders - they are not very big, typically 10's of megabytes.

How many libraries do you have? There's a very simple solution if you only have one library and another more sophisticated solution for multiple libraries.

What OS are you using - Window, OS/X or Linux?

Welcome to Mobile Read and apologies for taking so long to respond

Cheers BR

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by Arduno

Not sure if anyone else had the idea

But in a normal book you can see a list of series by the author before or after the title

Would be awesome if Calibre could make a a extra page next to the cover of every book

Which shows the Series list of the Author which it downloads from the Series list you made in Calibre with the book your reading now Bolded in that List

Would help managing which book is first and it helps you to figure out which is the next book on the reading list

@Arduno - I doubt this is a complete solution to what you want but maybe it goes part way

If you tab to the Series cell on a Book and press 'Q' you'll get a Quickview window of the books you have in that series, see ==>> Quickview — calibre User Manual

BR

[whitearrow]

I like having and keeping up to date a list of all the series in my library, in series order, that I can then put on my wifi-only device, so if I decide to start a new series I don't need the internet to see which is the first book.

I know you can do this to some extent by selecting and sorting, but the resulting file is kind of ugly and it takes a lot of editing to improve it. Is there a plugin or could there be a plugin that would generate a prettier version of such a file?

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by whitearrow

I like having and keeping up to date a list of all the series in my library, in series order, that I can then put on my wifi-only device, so if I decide to start a new series I don't need the internet to see which is the first book.

I know you can do this to some extent by selecting and sorting, but the resulting file is kind of ugly and it takes a lot of editing to improve it. Is there a plugin or could there be a plugin that would generate a prettier version of such a file?

@whitearrow - am I right in assuming the "kind of ugly" file is what you can get from the Catalogue feature?

BR

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by whitearrow

I like having and keeping up to date a list of all the series in my library, in series order, that I can then put on my wifi-only device, so if I decide to start a new series I don't need the internet to see which is the first book.

I know you can do this to some extent by selecting and sorting, but the resulting file is kind of ugly and it takes a lot of editing to improve it. Is there a plugin or could there be a plugin that would generate a prettier version of such a file?

Dare I suggest buying a device that actually supports display of series information? The Kobo ereaders do.

The usual solution is to use a plugboard to add the series information to the title of the book when it is sent to the device. That lets you see the series, sort to get the books together and search on the series. Otherwise, I would hope you can generate an appropriate catalogue, but I don't use them, so I can't give any advice.

[whitearrow]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

@whitearrow - am I right in assuming the "kind of ugly" file is what you can get from the Catalogue feature?

Correct

[whitearrow]

Originally Posted by davidfor

Dare I suggest buying a device that actually supports display of series information? The Kobo ereaders do.

Not a solution for me -- I love my Voyage and have no interest in changing devices.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by whitearrow

Correct

@whitearrow - most optional plugins have been developed by someone who wanted the plugin, rather than people looking for something to do They've then added enhancements into response to user requests,

The EPUB/MOBI catalogue generator is a built-in plugin, so you could download it from github, clone it into say YourCatalog, and then modify it to meet your requirements. You would install YourCatalog via Preferences->Plugins->Install plugin from file. It's up to you to decide if you want to make it publicly available, many people have private PI's that they've hacked from existing PIs. There are some sticky threads at the top of the Plugins subforum with guidelines in developing Plugins.

Another possibility is to create a CSV catalogue, import it into a word processing table and develop some 'macros' to a) get the data organised (column order and row sort) and b) format the data. And then convert the document to a format suitable for your device. If you're familiar and comfortable with say Word or Writer, you could use this approach as a prototyping tool, prior to developing YourCatalog PI.

BR

[whitearrow]

I appreciate the advice, but I know my technical limits, and I'm pretty sure 95% of what you just said exceeds them. But thank you for trying to help!

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by whitearrow

I appreciate the advice, but I know my technical limits, and I'm pretty sure 95% of what you just said exceeds them. But thank you for trying to help!

@whitearrow - if its just a list you want, then you could output a CSV catalogue.

If you use Windows here's a no-frills, no-install program that will let you do simple things like order the columns and sort the rows ==>> CSVFileView - CSV/Tab-delimited file viewer and converter. And once you've done that you can save it as HTML, drop it into calibre, and convert to whatever format you e-reader mandates. I've attached a sample EPUB of such a thing.

Another thing you could try is to make a formal request that the built-in catalogue be enhanced to meet your needs, you can do that here ==>> Bugs : calibre

BR

[franzvomsee]

Hello all,
Most of you may know WhatsApp, a multi platform chat program for smartphones. One option is to have group chats, where all members see all messages and objects posted. I have two groupchats going since 2011. One is with my best friends, the other one with my family.

WhatsApp has a function to export the group chat messages as a txt file.

I have done the job once and converted one years group chat log into an ebook with MS Word and Calibre. It is quite a repetitive job to do the formatting. Overall, the result is nice and it is fun to read through old conversations on your favourite ebook reader. I manually imported some of the sent pictures and location links as well.

My questions
Is Calibre the right platform to write a program for converting the text file (sample below) into an ebook?
Would this be a plugin?
What libraries/functions could be used to make conversion easy?

I am an old fashioned programmer from the 80s and might take up the battle to learn python or whatever is required.

Formatting job would be:
* Date/time stamp in different font, smaller
* New Page or other separator after day change
* Take care of some special characters/emoticons
* Sorting by date/time stamp (older log files sometimes are sorted by newest first)
* optional/later: Insert pictures found in a folder tree automatically (probably semi-automatic with confirmation)

Sample txt start
19. Sep. 2014 21:08 - Ken: Tomorrow midday..?
19. Sep. 2014 21:10 - Mark: How about around 15.00h. We're shopping and then watching the parade in the morning. Meeting Max for lunch. Got some time in the afternoon
19. Sep. 2014 21:39 - Ken: Ok 15:00.. meeting Tom..and Wil from Perth
Sometime in the afternoon
19. Sep. 2014 21:40 - Mark: Ok we'll come to yours at 15.00h
20. Sep. 2014 14:18 - Mark: Are you home now??
20. Sep. 2014 20:18 - Ken: What time you going to sub?
20. Sep. 2014 20:18 - Charles: Right now. Just leaving home
20. Sep. 2014 20:22 - Ken: We are in Fraunhofer. .
20. Sep. 2014 20:22 - Ken: Will come over when we have. eaten.
20. Sep. 2014 20:43 - Charles: Say hello to the rude waiters
Sample txt end

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by franzvomsee

Hello all,
Most of you may know WhatsApp, a multi platform chat program for smartphones. One option is to have group chats, where all members see all messages and objects posted. I have two groupchats going since 2011. One is with my best friends, the other one with my family.

WhatsApp has a function to export the group chat messages as a txt file.

I have done the job once and converted one years group chat log into an ebook with MS Word and Calibre. It is quite a repetitive job to do the formatting. Overall, the result is nice and it is fun to read through old conversations on your favourite ebook reader. I manually imported some of the sent pictures and location links as well.

@franzvomsee - rather than implementing a new plugin, you might want to consider using this as a first step ==>> Function Mode for Search & Replace in the Editor

I'm thinking it could be way to prototype the functionality of a subsequent plugin, or indeed it may be sufficient in itself.

Function Mode S&R is a relatively new feature.

BR

[theducks]

This is getting exasperating

Series metadata download happens and the series fills in, only there is already ANOTHER series with the same name:

Magic (4 different- unrelated series)
Star Force (2)
Code Breakers (2)
more, some errors yet to be discovered

Something (like Find Duplicates) that looks at a series name and the Authors.
If 1 or more authors Match = same series eg. Larry Niven and Greg Benford for Man-Kzin

No matches flag for User

A match should allow appearance in any level of a hierarchical series

Should MATCH, but flag:
missing or included articles (The Jones, Jonses)
if includes unnecessary words; Series, Novels
use of plurals: Mystery, Mysteries

Learn the fix used (tie breaker)/or ignore list

[Philosopher]

I would like to see a plugin that could take the data stored in Calibre - i.e. Title, Author, etc. (any such) - and update the PDF file's Information to those fields. (I'd like it to offer a choice of what fields to take from Calibre and where to put them in the PDF file - and thus also what PDF fields you want to input into.