Firstly, hats off to chaley for giving us this application-- it worked on my cellphone when a previous version of calibre wouldn't recognise it at all, and it keeps everything about my covers and tags-- I can browse for what I feel like reading now anytime on my device. Now it's even better with the latest GUI updates-- the grouping drawer with searchbar is a lovely addition. I'm absolutely glad I bought this app, despite the little hole it's put in my online budget.
Transferral of my book files to my device (Samsung Galaxy Note N7000) proceeds amazingly fast even when handling up to 400 or 500 books at once-- no complaints there.
The main issue for me now is the app's (and/or calibre) tendency to frequently time out while sending/receiving metadata with my large on-device library (8k+ epubs) at connection startup.
Often when I start connecting my device to calibre, I get a timeout debug message (text of error message at bottom) and I have to retry connecting to calibre. Back when the ondevice library was smaller, at around 2k or so it didn't happen as often, but now it usually takes me 2-3 tries before the connection between calibre and my device starts sending/receiving metadata, after which it usually remains stable-- occasional interruptions can happen here as well, though less often with the latest release, I noticed.
Pretty sure it's not the Wi-Fi connection at fault since both laptop and cellphone can have the full 5 bars of reception and still experience timeouts.
I understand a large on-device library with (eventually)11k~ books or more is not really an intended use-case for the app, but some way to speed up metadata send/receive would be great if possible, since it seems that's where CC or calibre itself is choking. I don't really mind waiting for all the data to sync-- as it is, it currently takes around 40 minutes for everything to sync up nicely, but not having to anxiously babysit the transfer at the beginning for fear of an unexpected timeout would be nice.
That said, the current version of CC has definitely improved on the previous iteration, since previously there was no way I could get 7k book's worth of metadata synced without having to retry more than 4 times. Now I only have to connect twice-- or once!
That's some wizardly improvement there.
calibre debug message on timeout:
Code:
There was a timeout while communicating with the device in function: Device did not respond in reasonable time
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "site-packages\calibre\gui2\device.py", line 85, in run
File "site-packages\calibre\gui2\device.py", line 476, in _books
File "site-packages\calibre\devices\smart_device_app\driver.py", line 49, in _synchronizer
File "site-packages\calibre\devices\smart_device_app\driver.py", line 1011, in books
File "site-packages\calibre\devices\smart_device_app\driver.py", line 565, in _call_client
File "site-packages\calibre\devices\smart_device_app\driver.py", line 598, in _receive_from_client
TimeoutError: There was a timeout while communicating with the device in function: Device did not respond in reasonable time