The Power of Delicious Library

Posted by Alec Feld on 02/21/07 in Applications, Home & Personal, Organization

Delicious Library from Delicious Monster is more than an app for keeping track of what DVDs, Games, CDs, and Books you own. It’s great for people with large DVD, book, music and game collections that want to see every single bit of information about what they have. It’s a complete media organizer, it’s a discovery utility that allows the user to see similar media to what they have, it keeps track of what movies your friends have hired from you. Delicious Library is a powerful app and today we’re going to look at everything it can do.

Delicious Library

1. Media Organization

The most basic thing Delicious Library does is keep track of media. You can scan in music, games, DVDs, and books using an iSight or a Bluetooth barcode scanner, or you can type in the barcode number/title of media and Delicious Library with search for it on Amazon and immediately add it to your library. Scanned titles show up on the “shelf”. The shelf is where Delicious Library keeps all of it’s media. A nice touch is that it actually looks like a shelf so book, game, DVD, and music covers are lined up all across it. It’s pretty realistic and enhances the UI.

Art, along with info, is fetched from Amazon, so the user has to type in virtually nothing. Delicious Library has four sections, Books, DVDs, Music, and Games, each for their respective media. Clicking on a piece of media shows all of it’s information, including author/artist, release date, summary information of media, format, genre, and pricing (including retail price and current price). You can also create your own custom shelves. For example, if some of my books are stored in the living room instead of where I normally keep my books, I can make a Living Room shelf and drag all of the books that I keep in the living room on that shelf. It’s great for remembering which room you keep certain books in.

2. Suggestions

Using Amazon’s suggestion tool, Delicious Library selects similar titles to the ones you have, and recommends them. You can purchase them right through Amazon by clicking a single button in the app. This is great for finding new media if you’re stuck on what to do.

3. Loan System

Ever lend DVDs and more to friends and never have them returned back to you? Delicious Library can help. With integrated iCal and Address Book support, you can add borrowers, select what item(s) they are borrowing, and then set a due date. iCal and Delicious Library remind you when their item is due or overdue.

4. Catalog To-Go

You can take your whole Delicious Library catalog with you. You can print it into a tiny packet, sync it to your iPod, or stick it on the web with DeliciWeb. This is great when going to the book store, video store, or music store, as you can see what items you already own.

Overall, Delicious Library is one of the best media organizers out there. You can print catalogs, keep track of loans, get personalized recomendations, and see your collections on lifelike shelves. Importing items is easier than ever with iSight/Bluetooth scanning, as well as Amazon searching. It’s well worth the $40 price tag if you have a huge collection that you want tidied up.

Price: $40

Link: Delicious Library

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10 Comment(s)

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Alex said on

February 21st, 2007 at 9:18 am

I am moving soon and am sorely tempted to get Delicious Library to document all my movies games and books for insurance purposes as they want a list kept of my DVD’s and what not. Also using the iSight as a scanner is very good

Yohannes Wijaya said on

February 21st, 2007 at 1:09 pm

Bought it as a bundle from the past macheist. I also got my DM’s theme from here: http://macthemes.net/contest/entries.php

Yohannes Wijaya said on

February 21st, 2007 at 4:08 pm

i forgot to add that the ipod synchronization feature is insaely helpful. i have been in many situations where my mbp is asleep and i needed to find the dvd i wanted to watch. (i stored my movies in 5 folders). So instead of waking up my machine, launch DM, etc. I can just use my ipod to search the location of the dvd i am interested in.

On a sidenote, i heard that the next version of DM will be leopard only and we can expect to see many new features thrown in.

Max said on

February 21st, 2007 at 4:23 pm

Its not so amazing if you have R2/3/4 DVDs I must have entered more than 50% manually - as it doesn’t pick up the info from Amazon you don’t have any of the much lauded extra benefits. Most of the pics pulled from Amazon seem to be pretty poor and aside from DVDs most other media pics end up with the wrong aspect ratio. Add to that almost all books added have to be done manually and you begin to see that there’s a lot of work to be put into DL as a user (esp. if you’re outside the US). I bought this in the last MacHeist and thought WOW! and since entering my collection and a few new ones I don’t think I’ve used it even once. Great eye candy, but of limited use unless you’re heavily into loaning your media.

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Indraneel said on

February 21st, 2007 at 6:35 pm

besides mac os x, this is the reason i’m getting a mac. well, it’s more like the quality of applications made for mac vs. those made for windows.

Yohannes Wijaya said on

February 21st, 2007 at 6:36 pm

let’s hope Will & co. fixes some of the issues ppl are facing. ex. DL occasionally fails to fetch movie’s info from amazon, only successful after 2 to 3 attempts. Development has been stagnant for a while. No groundbreaking new features for a while now. They should also come up w/ something to put our collection online, like deliciweb.

Sherb said on

February 21st, 2007 at 8:48 pm

I love the idea of DL and I think it’s very cool, but it’s kinda pointless unless you have a lot of movies, books, or CDs that you loan out to people.

Thermidor said on

February 23rd, 2007 at 5:35 pm

I love how it looks, but reality has set in. The more you have, the slower it gets. I’ve got about 200 movies entered, and it’s noticeably more sluggish on my G5. And I’m supposed to load it with my books, videogames, and music? You’re supposed to toss all your eggs in one basket, all of your media in one pretty database. I have no idea why they don’t let you create SEPARATE libraries for your collections. If I want a movie, I can open the movie collection. If I want to choose a book, I can open the book library. I’m afraid to say it, but it’s eye candy that looks great at the expense of usability. Delicious Library becomes less useful the more you use it.

Nick Cotton said on

February 26th, 2007 at 2:23 am

For more info about Delicious Library, and a few teases about what’s coming in the next version, check out their official forums: http://forums.macnn.com/delicious-monster/

Enjoy!

Scott H said on

February 26th, 2007 at 9:06 am

If you’re more interested in a smooth iTunes-like interface instead of a cartoon-like one, much more customizability, more rapid development of new features, tweaks, and fixes, and none of those performance issues, take a look at DVDPedia and BookPedia (bruji.com). I’ve got over 600 DVDs in DVDPedia and have no performance issues at all on my G4.