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Help with importing ...
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jpphipps
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: Jul 2006
Status: Offline
Jun 2, 2006, 07:57 PM
 
Hello,

I downloaded the evaluation of this program and I've been importing my DVDs using the iSight on my Macbook Pro. The program is really neat, however, I've run into a problem with some of my discs. The isight scanner recognizes the disc (I hear the beep), I can see the correct cover art pulled from Amazon but the icon is greyed out and the voice says "lookup failed" even though it clearly has pulled the right title from Amazon. When I try to click the "+" over the cover art, the voice repeats "lookup failed." This happens with titles like the Untouchables DVD, The Usual Suspects, among others.

Is there any way around this problem? Is there any way to force it to import this? I'd like to license this but if this keeps happening past my 25 discs, it'd be frustrating.

Any help very much appreciated.


BTW, I did a search here and at the Delcious Monster site but found nothing.
     
foodog
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Join Date: Jul 2006
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Jun 2, 2006, 09:57 PM
 
(With the usual disclaimer of no problem being exactly common, as problems go, this one is pretty common.)

The first thing to do is to delete, within your home directory, the folder ~/Library/Caches/Delicious Library/

This fixes this problem 90% of the time. However, there may still be the occasional stubborn item. There are two ways to get such an item to load.

The first is to reload it. We don't know why, but sometimes you can reload it a few times and it will fail, and fail, and fail, and... BOING! Load right up.

Another is to look the item up on Amazon and drag it into Delicious LIbrary.

At any rate, we're continuing to examine this issue, and if it's fixable, we'll get it fixed.

-Mike
     
jpphipps  (op)
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Join Date: Jul 2006
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Jun 3, 2006, 01:03 PM
 
Thanks for the reply. This seems to have solved it.
     
ssevennm
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Join Date: Aug 2003
Location: Edgewood, NM
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Jun 5, 2006, 12:51 PM
 
Originally Posted by Delicious Monster
The first thing to do is to delete, within your home directory, the folder ~/Library/Caches/Delicious Library/
I certainly should know better, but for some reason I did it anyway. I opened Terminal, typed rm -rf and pasted that in there. The space of course would start the process of deleting ~/Library. I caught mine right after it deleted "Application Support" and was working on "Automator" including my "Delicious Library" for which I have no current backup. I know I should know better, but use "~/Library/Caches/Delicious Library/" or ~/Library/Caches/Delicious\ Library/ if you don't want to reimport your 300+ DVDs
     
Ed S
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Join Date: Oct 2006
Location: Los Alamos, NM, USA
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Nov 1, 2006, 05:53 PM
 
We don't know why, but sometimes you can reload it a few times and it will fail, and fail, and fail, and... BOING! Load right up.
Any progress on identifying/fixing the problem?

I'm seeing this often: about 50-70% of what I scan. It's frustrating. The symptom is: "Lookup Failed", but the correct item shows up in the right-hand column with a plus sign next to it. Click, click, click, click, sometimes it takes ten clicks before it will import the data.

When: this happens with the iSight scanner, the Flic, and when entering ISBNs manually.

System: 20" iMac, 10.4.8. ~/Library/Caches/Delicious\ Library/ is empty (per ls -la). I can rmdir it, but that has no effect. Console log shows these messages recurring:

[...] Delicious Library[2644] <NSKVONotifying_LILibrary: 0xd40e920> writeData
[...] Delicious Library[2644] Scheduling fail-safe backup to be seven minutes from now

...but I don't think they're related (they happen in normal times too).

Perhaps an instrumented version could say *why* the code thinks the lookup failed? Or at least emit log info? If you can build a debug version of 1.0, I'll be glad to run it. Is there any other info I can provide?
     
Delicious Monster
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Join Date: Jun 2006
Status: Offline
Nov 2, 2006, 03:57 PM
 
This actually turns out to be two different bugs with the same symptoms.

In previous versions, there was a fight between Mac OS X and Delicious Library over whether to cache your lookups. This has been fixed, but people who've upgraded from previous versions might still run into it if they've never deleted their cache folder, as described above.

These symptoms still occur on Intel boxes, regardless of the cache, so we thought there was some endian issue lurking around. It turns out the problem is not with Intel per se. It's just that the Core processors are so fast they're running circles around the relatively ancient components used in lookups.

We've completely redone the lookups for Delicious Library 2 using new components introduced in Tiger, which has the side effect of eliminating this bug, as well as our most common crash.

We've also done some work to reduce, though not completely eliminate, occurrences of this bug in the next incremental update, 1.6.4, currently in beta.

So it's sort of a good news, bad news situation, with the added cold comfort of knowing the bug is caused by your computer being too darn fast.

For what it's worth, the work around of selecting the failed items and typing ⌘r until they reload still works.
     
Ed S
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Location: Los Alamos, NM, USA
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Nov 2, 2006, 04:59 PM
 
Yes, this is a brand-new iMac: just one month old. I'll call Apple and demand that they take it back as defective ("too darn fast").

Thanks for the quick reply. I appreciate your response.
     
dnerf
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Join Date: Oct 2006
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Nov 6, 2006, 03:02 PM
 
I don't know if it's coincidence, but if I get repeated 'lookup failed' on a partially-successful lookup, then it succedes if I delete the UPC code from the candidate retrieval and try again.
     
Delicious Monster
Dedicated MacNNer
Join Date: Jun 2006
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Nov 6, 2006, 04:20 PM
 
That's really interesting.

Insofar as the barcode number is translated into an Amazon number, and the Amazon number is used for subsequent lookups, maybe that's what's happening.

It would be interesting to look at the actual XML representation of the partially failed item and see if it has the Amazon number listed.
     
Ed S
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Join Date: Oct 2006
Location: Los Alamos, NM, USA
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Nov 10, 2006, 04:02 PM
 
Followup: I installed 1.6.4 this morning and have imported 20+ books since then. Not a single "Lookup failed". I've imported by ISBN, by Amazon.com drag&drop (Camino), and by scanning (Flic). This is on a 2-month-old Intel iMac. Before 1.6.4, there was no way I could import 20 books without half of them failing.

Some problems with the Flic, but that's a topic for another post... once I characterize the problem a little better...

Thanks for the fix!
     
jtice
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Join Date: Mar 2002
Location: Blacksburg, Virginia
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Dec 18, 2006, 02:55 PM
 
thought I'd post some tips to share the benefits of my trial and error process...

first I tried to use the little iSight camera built into the macbook pro and it was just taking forever. a completely frustrating experience, so save yourself some grief and don't plan on scanning a substantial library this way. some bar codes wouldn't read at all and most required a lot of moving and twisting to get it to scan. then, even after the bar code was recognized or entered by hand i was getting the "lookup failed" message about 60% of the time. i don't have a separate iSight camera but the thought occurred that it might work better with our sony handycam, so I hooked it up and it was like magic. the camera's auto focus locked onto the code like a magnet. sometimes the scanner beeped before i even held the cd still. then i also noticed that the lookup failed message was not happening as often. this was early in the morning. but at lunchtime it was happening more. i'm wondering if it's not related to how busy the amazon servers are––pure speculation. anyway, hitting command-r twice quickly resulted in a high percentage of successes wheras single command-r retries would take many tries. with these two tricks i was able to load a couple hundred in a little over an hour including a few manual lookups. be sure to delete ~/Library/Caches/Delicious Library/ before starting.
Now that everyone knows it's just a matter of waiting for 1.20.09.
     
 
   
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