Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Commercial, Freeware
Libra: A free Delicious Library clone
by Ian Dumych Mar 6th 2008 at 10:00AM
Yesterday we introduced you to MediaMan, and although we found it to be feature rich, we struggled with the webcam barcode scanner. One of our readers pointed out the existence of Libra, and we couldn't help but take it for a spin.Frankly, if you've tried MediaMan or Delicious Library, there is nothing here you haven't seen before. The only compelling feature in this product is the price; $0. Although it seems a little uglier that its siblings, Libra does webcam scanning right. We were impressed to find that it is able to scan bacodes at any angle very quickly, making this feature practical and faster than entering it by hand (gasp!)
We recommend this program for anyone looking for a free tool to organize their books, movies, and games, but watch out for the bugs. It crashed on us four times in a half hour, but that might be Windows XP SP3's fault.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Daniel Milner said 12:25PM on 3-06-2008
Hopefully those bugs will be gone when it comes out of beta.
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Joe said 1:26PM on 3-06-2008
Went over to the download page and noticed that someone posted a review that claims that this is a spyware program.
Anyone know anything about that?
thx
joe
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Kevin Archibald said 1:13PM on 3-06-2008
I loaded libra on yesterday - it's pretty cool, and a good way to say, make a nice viewable library for all your AVI's that you can launch by clicking on.
If only it had a more automated way of adding them! Connecting a file to a movie is a bit laborious - maybe not for 1 but when you have dozens of AVI's, it would be nice to either drag to it or scan a folder.
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John said 6:42PM on 3-06-2008
There is also an online version of this type of utility called www.librarything.com You can store up to 200 books (no movies) for free and export them to .csv or access from mobile phone/internet. The pay version of the service is $25. The nice thing about the website is it has user groups forums so you can find other people who read the same books as you, get reviews and suggestion from them etc.
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chriszf said 12:19PM on 3-24-2008
There's also a more delicious-library-like app I'm writing called lifeshelf. It's free and a lot simpler than librarything. It's really for those of us who don't want to be librarians in our spare time.
http://lifeshelf.net
Bob said 4:31PM on 3-06-2008
He's insane.
Look at some of his other "reviews".
Outside of that one guy, I see no evidence of spyware - anywhere.
I wouldn't worry about it.
Reply
Ian Dumych said 6:46PM on 3-06-2008
Bob: Yikes, I thought you were talking about me for a second! Whew. Anyway, Download.com tests all their files for malware, so rest easy everyone.
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James said 12:28PM on 3-07-2008
I was gonna ask if there was any easy way of cataloging your electronic-only movies and music (Unbox purchases, online music stores, etc.), or if you have to hand-tool everything. I've got a bunch of DVDs, but most of my music was bought online, and I have a fair few digital-distro movies as well. It sounds like #2 is telling me you have to do them one by one, which does not sound fun...
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Maliboo00 said 2:49PM on 3-07-2008
The Amazon.com "Your Media Library" also accepts input by scanning barcodes with a webcam. PLUS, it already has everything you've bought from Amazon.com already in the database!
http://www.amazon.com/gp/ays/index.html
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