How to fix Calibre Companion network connection problems on OSX

If you enjoy ebooks, chances are you’ve heard of Calibre.  This free ebook library program does lots of excellent things like organize your collection, let you change formats and provides a wireless content server.

If you have an android phone there’s an app called Calibre Companion that lets you connect to your calibre library and manage the transfer of books to your phone, but I ran into a problem getting it to work with calibre 2.10 on Mac OS X.  Here’s the issue I ran into:

I have multiple IP addresses on my machine, but for whatever reason I couldn’t get Calibre to run its content server on the WiFi IP, which Calibre Companion requires in order to connect.

There’s a simple tweak that tells Calibre to listen on all connections, this worked for me:

Open up preferences and at the bottom of the screen you’ll find an item for ‘tweaks’

Click that and scroll down on the left side list until you find “What interfaces should the content server listen on?”

In there is where you’ll add your tweak, which is simply to tell it to listen on all interfaces. That looks like this:

server_listen_on = ‘::’

Once you have that in the tweaks section you can simply hit apply.  You should then be able to restart calibre and connect using Calibre Companion!