Scribe not seen my Calibre 7.11?

[RKrueger]

Downloaded the latest Calibre on my Mac, eager to test out the sideloaded cover fix, but I can no longer get my Scribe to be recognized by Calibre. It is recognized by Android File Transfer. Usually I then quit AFT and start Calibre, which begins the recognition of the device. But now I get an error message:

Failed to get storage info for device.
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "calibre/gui2/device.py", line 111, in run
File "calibre/gui2/device.py", line 531, in _get_device_information
File "calibre/devices/mtp/base.py", line 24, in synchronizer
File "calibre/devices/mtp/unix/driver.py", line 358, in free_space
libmtp.MTPError: Failed to get storage info for device.

Can anybody please help with this?

[tomsem]

Closing the Android File Transfer application does not shut down the AFT agent. If you plugin in an MTP device after shutting down the application, the agent will try to launch the application again, and that might be interfering with calibre when it checks for connected devices.

I stopped using AFT because you cannot prevent it from installing the agent as a Login item and I just want to have control over what connects to MTP and when, without having to constantly shut down AFT.

Instead I use OpenMTP. It has an option to install a 'watcher' but otherwise when you quit the app, it's gone.

Interestingly the download link is gone from https://www.android.com/filetransfer/

I was able to use brew install (so I could re-check the behavior of AFT), but I don't know if that really works now, because it found the AFT dmg in my brew cache and never tried the official download URL.

At any rate my advice would be to uninstall AFT and try calibre again. It's working for me. And then get OpenMTP. (brew install --cask openmtp, or from GitHub)

FWIW I can reproduce the exact error you are seeing by waiting until calibre starts to connect and tapping the Disconnect button on Scribe.

[RKrueger]

Thanks for your response, but I'm still not getting it to work. I uninstalled Android File Transfer as completely as I could (stopping process, removing it from LogIn items,trashing app icon and associated Library files), but when I start Calibre it does not recognize that my Scribe is attached. I installed OpenMTP, and it recognizes the Scribe and shows its contents. I uninstalled Calibre and did a fresh install, but still the same issue: it doesn't recognize that a device is attached, but when I hit the disconnect button on the Scribe it gives the same error I quoted in the original post.

Any further assistance would be greatly appreciated!

[axu2]

Try booting Mac in safe mode.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by RKrueger

Thanks for your response, but I'm still not getting it to work. I uninstalled Android File Transfer as completely as I could (stopping process, removing it from LogIn items,trashing app icon and associated Library files), but when I start Calibre it does not recognize that my Scribe is attached. I installed OpenMTP, and it recognizes the Scribe and shows its contents. I uninstalled Calibre and did a fresh install, but still the same issue: it doesn't recognize that a device is attached, but when I hit the disconnect button on the Scribe it gives the same error I quoted in the original post.

Any further assistance would be greatly appreciated!

How much time are you giving calibre to connect? In my case it takes about 25-30 seconds. I think this is significantly longer than with previous versions. (On my M1 MacBook, it takes maybe 3-5 seconds longer)

Note that with thumbnail support added, calibre is doing its 'housekeeping' to restore thumbnails from the /amazon-cover-bug folder, maybe that is why. (I wish there were a way to turn that off, I'm pretty sure it is not necessary.)

The fact that calibre complains when you Disconnect indicates calibre is in process of connecting.

Also it might well take longer to get to 'ready' if you have more side-loaded books, or more books in general on the device. Calibre has to look everything up to see what is what.

I only have a couple of side-loaded books and a handful of downloaded ones.

There's a way to run calibre in debug mode from Terminal and it will spew output to stdout and stderr, including what it is doing with MTP:

https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/gen...bre-debug.html

/Applications/calibre.app/Contents/MacOS/calibre-debug -g

[Archibald Yates]

Is your Mac detecting your Kindle at all? And can you copy anything onto it via the Finder?

I'm asking because for a while (Ventura) this is not working with my Kindle Paperwhite anymore. The Finder tells me that there is no space left on the Kindle although there are free GBs. And so it does not copy anything.

Path Finder, a third party Finder replacement, does show zero free byte too but copies nonetheless.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by Archibald Yates

Is your Mac detecting your Kindle at all? And can you copy anything onto it via the Finder?

I'm asking because for a while (Ventura) this is not working with my Kindle Paperwhite anymore. The Finder tells me that there is no space left on the Kindle although there are free GBs. And so it does not copy anything.

Path Finder, a third party Finder replacement, does show zero free byte too but copies nonetheless.

Scribe is not like other Kindles, it uses MTP protocol and not USB Mass Storage. It does not mount in Finder.

As to your issue, you could try running Disk Utility to see what it reports on free space. You could also run First Aid to see if it fixes anything.

[DNSB]

Actually, you can mount an MTP device in Finder. Unfortunately, that means only Finder can see it since only a single connection to an MTP device is possible with current MacOS and Linux implementations.

[RKrueger]

I experimented with Calibre versions. Uninstalled 7.11 and re-installed 7.09. Caibre immediate connects to the device and starts 3 jobs:

Get device information
Set library information
Get list of books on device

I updated to 7.10, and it also immediately started those same 3 jobs.

But when I update to 7.11, Calibre doesn't start any jobs.

I have a lot of side-loaded books. Under 7.09 and 7.10, the last job, "Get list of books on device" takes over an hour to complete (back before the Amazon switch to MTP, it would only take about a minute on USB). If 7.11 is trying to do these jobs in the background before showing them in the job list, then maybe I should let it sit for an hour or more. I'll report back.

Thanks to everyone for their feedback!

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Actually, you can mount an MTP device in Finder. Unfortunately, that means only Finder can see it since only a single connection to an MTP device is possible with current MacOS and Linux implementations.

How is this done?

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by RKrueger

I experimented with Calibre versions. Uninstalled 7.11 and re-installed 7.09. Caibre immediate connects to the device and starts 3 jobs:

Get device information
Set library information
Get list of books on device

I updated to 7.10, and it also immediately started those same 3 jobs.

But when I update to 7.11, Calibre doesn't start any jobs.

I have a lot of side-loaded books. Under 7.09 and 7.10, the last job, "Get list of books on device" takes over an hour to complete (back before the Amazon switch to MTP, it would only take about a minute on USB). If 7.11 is trying to do these jobs in the background before showing them in the job list, then maybe I should let it sit for an hour or more. I'll report back.

Thanks to everyone for their feedback!

That sounds about right. It sure seems there is some opportunity for optimization here. Judging from the console traffic I was seeing with calibre-debug, and less than 20 books, there seemed to be a lot more back and forth than I would expect.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by tomsem

How is this done?

To show in in Finder? Android File Transfer or OpenMTP are programs I've seen mentioned.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by DNSB

To show in in Finder? Android File Transfer or OpenMTP are programs I've seen mentioned.

Those do not integrate with Finder, they are separate applications.

Windows File Explorer works with MTP devices.

[RKrueger]

Let Caibre 7.11 run overnight, and it eventually worked, including moving the side-loaded book thumbnails over to the Scribe. Don't know how many hours this took. In any case, this is totally impractical for me. I'll stick with version 7.10 and Android File Transfer for now, and hope that version 7.12 works better.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by RKrueger

Let Caibre 7.11 run overnight, and it eventually worked, including moving the side-loaded book thumbnails over to the Scribe. Don't know how many hours this took. In any case, this is totally impractical for me. I'll stick with version 7.10 and Android File Transfer for now, and hope that version 7.12 works better.

About how many books do you have on your Scribe? and how many of those are side-loaded?

I've been looking at calibre's MTP code (and running calibre-debug to see what it is doing) but given I have only about a dozen books on device, it proceeds expeditiously: 24s to 'ready'.

The console logging is not detailed enough to understand how it is spending time (no time stamps), and I've never managed to figure out how to run calibre in a debugger.

For another data point, I downloaded 60 more books (the contents of one of my collections), waited until these got indexed (), and then measured again: 32s to 'ready'. That does not seem problematic, but maybe it has more to do with how many side-loaded books there are.