Cannot kill jobs that communicate with device

[Roy Preston]

So I wanted to move some files from Calibre onto my Samsung Galaxy 3 phone. I opened Calibre, plugged my phone into the USB port and tried to send three files to the phone.

Job: Get device information. Finished.
Job: Set library information. Finished.
Job: Upload 0 books to device. Waiting.
Job: Get list of books on device. Found object: vocab_x42.jpg

Nothing is happening. I can't kill this job. "Can't kill jobs that communicate with device." I can't change my preferences while the job is running (not that I know if doing that would make any difference). I can't eject the device.

I can just unplug my phone. Or shut down Calibre. But EVERY TIME I plug the phone in, this same stupid job resumes...but never completes and never does anything. I've tried rebooting my phone, rebooting my computer, I even uninstalled and reinstalled Calibre.

What do I have to do make this **** job stop running?

[PeterT]

Whenever a device is connected, calibre does a scan looking for content on the device.

On most types of devices this is a quick process.

Unfortunately, the first connection of an an Android device is very slow as calibre scans the ENTIRE device. All you can do is wait and let that initial scan complete, and then (VERY IMPORANT) configure calibre to ensure it only scans the locations YOU WANT in future.

This is done by clicking on the arrow besides the Device icon in the calibre menu and selecting the Configure this device. Select the Chane scanned folders button and ensure that ONLY the folder(s) that you intend to place books in has been selected. Once this has been done, click OK.

Subsequent scans of your device by calibre will be a lot LOT quicker.

[DaltonST]

Unfortunately, there is a Catch-22 situation. Calibre does not allow you to set a device to "IGNORE" before it has ever been plugged in while Calibre is running. Further, you cannot configure the directories to search before it is plugged in the first time. If the job never finishes, you cannot do anything, ever.

The Device Job that Calibre automatically starts the first time a device is connected never finished for an old NookColor that I have that has 14,000+ epubs on the external SD Card in the Books folder. Because the job never finished before it errored out, Calibre never could offer it in the Preferences to IGNORE it. I could not even configure it to search a bogus, empty directory to keep it from ever searching the real Books folder.

What I wanted to do is to have Calibre ignore the NookColor, and then use "Save To Single Directory" to save just the .epub files from Calibre into the Books folder of the device.

What I ended up doing was to insert a blank SD card with just a fake directory, let the job finish, set the device to IGNORE in Calibre, then replaced the blank SD card with the real SD card that also as the same fake directory that never has anything in it.

Of course, if your SD card is internal, not external, the Catch-22 forces you to this workaround: You "Save to a Single Directory" on the PC, and then manually move the books from the special PC directory to the internal SD card on the device. You can never plug the device in to the PC while Calibre is running, of course.

Obviously, 14,000+ books on a device is bit extreme, but at the time the books were loaded onto the NookColor, it was practical and desirable, and well worth it given the geographical location and situation in which the device was being used to read.

Amazingly, FBReader for Android does not blink at the large number of books, although the Rescans of the books to update its metadata indexes do take a little while to run, but they are background tasks that do not interfere with reading.

Anyway, it would be nice to be able to "pre-ignore" a device. I wouldn't hold my breath, though.



DaltonST

[chaley]

Originally Posted by DaltonST

Anyway, it would be nice to be able to "pre-ignore" a device. I wouldn't hold my breath, though.

In my experience, every time I plug in a new MTP device calibre asks me if I want it to "manage" that device. You can say "no", effectively "pre-ignoring" it.

[kovidgoyal]

You can also ignore any device even if you told calibre you want to manage it, by simply unplugging it, starting calibre, then going to Preferences->Plugins and customize the MTP plugin, where there is a list of seen devices, which you can choose to ignore.

And note that calibre does not actually scan the entire device, there are a number of "common" folders it skips by default such as Android, Video, Audio, etc.

[Dan_nook]

I've noticed that calibre has a habit of crashing when it unexpectedly loses a device connection. Today I plugged in my phone, copied some music files to it, and then "ejected" (this was on Windows). Nothing to do with calibre but it happened to be running. As soon as I ejected, calibre crashed. I'm not sure, but I think this was the first time calibre had seen the device.

Using the tip above, I've added the device to the "ignore" list.

[victorvscn]

Ok, I've figured it out. All you need to do is go to %AppData%\calibre and edit the file mtp_devices.json using any text editor. You should add your device code to blacklist; for example:

{
  "blacklist": [
    "R51F601VHWF"
  ], 
  "history": {
    "R51F601VHWF": [
      "victorvscn (Potato phone)", 
      "2015-07-03T21:13:35.328000+00:00"
    ]
  }
}

My device code was R51F601VHWF, since it corresponded to the entry under history, so I added that code to the blacklist. If your blacklist already has a device, then you have to use a comma to separate your new comma (and, obviously, use the double quotes).

[eschwartz]

Okay, sure, you can always manually edit the configuration files. If you know how and are comfortable getting that deeply into things.

(And yes, I would so do that myself. Not everyone is that adventurous though. )