Some time ago I gave up using sonarr & radarr to watch (popular) tv shows and movies because the search just stopped giving decent results. Now I heard that rarbg has also quit.
So I am wondering, is this still a thing?
Automation apps have gotten more popular over the years so yes, they are still a thing.
Sonarr/Radarr are the most popular ones but there are others too. Most work with torrents and usenet but you’d need to check the individual projects to be sure.
Book Automation Link Description LazyLibrarian https://gitlab.com/LazyLibrarian/LazyLibrarian Audiobooks / Books / Magazines Mylar3 https://github.com/mylar3/mylar3 Comic Books Readarr https://readarr.com Audiobooks / Books Movies/TV Automation Link Description DuckieTV https://schizoduckie.github.io/DuckieTV TV Medusa https://pymedusa.com TV Nefarious https://lardbit.github.io/nefarious Movies/TV app (using Jackett/Transmission) Radarr https://radarr.video Movies SickChill https://sickchill.github.io TV SickGear https://github.com/SickGear/SickGear TV Sonarr https://sonarr.tv TV Watcher https://github.com/barbequesauce/Watcher3 Movies Music Automation Link Description Headphones https://github.com/rembo10/headphones Music Lidarr https://lidarr.audio Music General Automation Link Description Autobrr https://autobrr.com Monitor IRC announce channels and RSS feeds FlexGet https://flexget.com Monitor RSS feeds RSSToolBot http://rsstoolbot.infymus.com Monitor and aggregate RSS feeds fucking lemmy man, wrote out awhole ass answer to this and got deleted. god fucking dammit.
welp. here goes again.
headphones is a monthly subscription and not that great, not worth it at all.
lidarr is garbage and the folks around it are assholes. you iether love it and froth at the mouth when someone says they’re having trouble with it, or you hate it. It also is a fucking resource hog like I’ve never seen. MAJOR memory leaks
I use Roon and Qobuz, and Nicotine+ for stuff that isn’t on Qobuz. qobuz-dl is really robust and awesome and can do anything you want lidarr to do: just maintain a list of artists in a document, and qobuz-dl will automatically download anything new as it keeps track of what’s already been downloaded before.
The Roon folks are just as bad as the Lidarr folks. This shit costs $7-800 for a lifetime license and it does’t even include ANY music streaming. It’s just a music server and manager. And they don’t actually have tech support. Literally if you go to their support page, they direct you to a fucking forum full of morons high on the koolaid (bc honestly you have to be if you invested $700 on a shitty music player), tell you to get lost if you don’t like a program with bugs up the ass.
I would love to make an open source offering that does what roon does but also allows you to automatically download stuff using qobuz-dl, tidal-dl, bandcamp-dl, etc.
Have you considered using Plex as your music server? I’ve had a great experience with it.
Jellyfin for me!
Headphones only costs money if you want to use their indexer. Ive never paid but does seem like a reasonable way to fund your project.
Why are the lidarr devs assholes? Also I have never experienced any memory leaks to my knowledge and the only time it slows down is if I’m trying to match my entire library
https://github.com/RandomNinjaAtk/docker-lidarr-extended comes with a bunch ofadditionaldownload scripts like tidall-dl
Have you seen how they interact with people? It’s embarrassing. Very pretentious, and they get pissy if your don’t understand every facet of their poorly documented, poorly designed app. Yes it’s free and open source. There’s lots of FOSS stuff that isn’t run by opinionated gatekeepers.
If you experience a bug, they bend over backwards to make it seem like it’s your fault. “No dude, it’s supposed to delete your entire library if you accidentally click that one button. You should have read the documentation that we’re going to release sometime in the future”
I maintain my library with Lidarr in a manual manner for downloads and imports. I didn’t experience memory leaks.
That’s good for you, thanks for chiming in
Logitech Media Server (LMS)/slimserver may tick a lot of your Roon requirements.
Wow, that’s a name I haven’t heard for a long time!
I previously ran that with some Squeezeboxes if anyone remembers those.
Yeah! The squeezebox software is still out there too, it’s a sudo apt-get get away in something like it Ubuntu and just works (though does commandeer the audio on any pc you do that on by default)
I did some light research and boy was it difficult to find anything out. Can you point me in the direction of a guide? I’ve heard that was the closest you can get so I may as well try it out. But yeah I spent way too much time trying to even find an installer or docker container for my nas and came up with nothing
I personally use piCorePlayer on a raspberry pi which is basically burn an SD card which gives you a squeezebox (basically a client) there’s a couple more steps to get lms running on top of that but the instructions are pretty good: https://docs.picoreplayer.org/how-to/install_lms/
Official docker image seems to be here https://hub.docker.com/r/lmscommunity/logitechmediaserver
You’ll want to install the “material skin” too if you do get it running, it’s a pretty modern front end:
https://github.com/CDrummond/lms-material
Official forum is packed with info too:
Thank you for your extensive post 👍🏼
Nice list, appreciated
Nicee
Sonarr and Radarr ARE THE THING, without them I hardly would use Torrents nowadays lol.
The are better than ever, they completely changed my server.
Man, I stopped using torrents 90 percent of the time. Usenet all day.
It very much IS still a thing!
Depending on your preferences, there’s even been a pretty big update to Sonarr which allows custom formats, thus bringing out some pretty powerful abilities!
For example, I have it set up EXACTLY how I want for anime. X265 PREFERRED, Dual Audio PREFERRED, a whole smack of uploaders were essentially blocked from ever being downloaded, and there’s a few users who trump all else and will always be downloaded first if they are available. So good.
There’s a few guides if you want to give it a try! :)
Do you have any guides for the custom anime formats? I haven’t updated yet and would love to get more dual audio releases. My current setup is pretty hit or miss as to whether I ever get a dub of a show.
https://trash-guides.info/Radarr/Radarr-collection-of-custom-formats/ for radarr
https://trash-guides.info/Sonarr/sonarr-collection-of-custom-formats/ for sonarr
These are fantastic have really upped my quality. I was just randomly grabbing releases without knowing whether they had atmos or hdr 10 or dv etc. This is SUPER helpful as you can give a score and then when you manually search, it chooses the highest score.
For me the highest custom format score possible is Dolby Vision with hdr10 or hdr10+ fallback, truehd atmos, criterion collection. This was a custom one I made. YOu can also follow precisely their own prescriptions for how to use the custom formats if you like, which I may go back and do.
That said, some releases that say atmos in the title are not atmos and it pisses me off. The good thing is you can find which scene releasesd , check out a few more “atmos” titles from them and see if it’s worth just blocking their releases entirely, which you can do with custom formats.
I think the next step for radarr/sonarr is to make those custom formats a LOT easier to manage on your own. LIke let you give a a priority list or video codecs, a priority list of audio codecs, a priority list for other things such as criterion collection, etcc.
gonna piggyback off of your comment, here is a trash guide specifically for anime in Sonarr!
This is what I used, and I added some custom rules too! There is an uploader who goes by “Judas”, so I added a rule that gives a positive weight of 100 whenever it’s his upload, so if it’s between 2 exact copies of a torrent, but 1 is by Judas, then he gets priority. I also made 265 a positive score instead of negative. And I also made dual audio positive.
It works very well for me!
To piggyback on what /u/MonkCanatella said, here is a trash guide specifically for anime in Sonarr!
This is what I used, and I added some custom rules too! There is an uploader who goes by “Judas”, so I added a rule that gives a positive weight of 100 whenever it’s his upload, so if it’s between 2 exact copies of a torrent, but 1 is by Judas, then he gets priority. I also made 265 a positive score instead of negative. And I also made dual audio positive.
It works very well for me!
I have plex setup, and I have two tv’s, one from 2022 and and one from 2015, Samsung for some reason the old tv sometimes on some shows has this screen tearing thing… I don’t know why, any ideas?
The search results are as good as your trackers, in my experience.
The only issues I have are occasionally with documentary series - like Nova where it can be a little hit or miss, everything else has been solid.
My issue with Nova is that PBS and The TVDB don’t agree on season/episode numbers so I often have to rename files. When uploaders title based on TVDB numbering, everything works great.
The only issues I have are occasionally with documentary series - like Nova where it can be a little hit or miss, everything else has been solid.
You can get all the episodes of nova from the pbs website https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/
You can get all the episodes of nova from the pbs website https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/
I did not know that, thanks!
Have a look at Jackett, it re-produces the search results for hundreds of torrent sites as Torznab feeds, what that means is that these can then be added to indexes for Sonarr and Radarr.
Prowlarr instead of Jackett. It’s simplier and more convenient.
I guess I’ll be looking into Prowlerr then 😆 does Prowlerr still require Mono?
I had issues getting Prowlarr to connect to many sites at all. Jackett just works and has a huge list of working sites, however syncing them all up in the other arr services is a pain which is where https://github.com/AllergicDuck/jackett-sync-ts comes in.
+1 for jackett. Been running the same instance for years and it has not failed once. Super simple and low overhead.
Or prowlarr for something different and a bit more powerful
If you had issues with search results then the problem is your indexers, Sonarr queries the sources you give it, if you give it bad sources then it’s going to have bad results.
I use Sonarr and Lidarr with private trackers and usenet where usenet is the preferred download source. I also use Jackett to combine the trackers so I can make one query from Sonarr to multiple trackers. Previously, for the longest time, going back to 2007, I used a torrent client with an RSS feed to download new TV show releases. It worked, but Sonarr provides far more granularity. And it is wife friendly, she can easily go on and add a show by herself. I don’t know of anything that works better than Sonarr, so OP… what would we have been using instead of it?
I use it. I got a Usenet acct and just use torrents as a backup.
Very much so. I just switched to prowlarr from jacket to handle searches. I use pirate bay for all media 1337x, and eztv for television and find most everything that’s not obscure. Have it all behind a VPN though obviously.
I still use it. It still works well enough for me that it’s mostly fire and forget.
Radarr/sonarr/jackett is the way
Why not prowler?
Didn’t discover it until after a lot of time.
Also, while the linux setup is great, i’ve been running a windows build with great results.
Ahh makes sense!
yeah they work great here’s how I have mine setup
Sabznbd Prowlarr Sonarr Radarr Docker container for Flaresolverr https://github.com/FlareSolverr/FlareSolverr
Now if you want to go further than that you can setup profiles https://trash-guides.info/ for quality.
But the truth is the problem isn’t Sonarr or Radarr it’s just that Torrents can be kind of garbage with automation, I would suggest you look into Usenet. It costs a bit of money to spend but a much more consistent experience.
I use sonarr for a few weekly shows i watch and never had any big problems. I use torrents with jackett for my indexers. Downloading whole seasons works prefectly too assuming the show is popular enough to have seeders. Ive been recommended prowlarr over jackett but ive not had any reason to swap yet!
You can still self-host a local copy of (almost?) all the rarbg torrents for *arr apps to use as index, a lot of them still have seeds.
How can we do this?
mgdigital RARBG selfhosted Torznab
How do wet get that setup
Searching for files is not what Sonarr and Radarr are really strong in. They do an excellent job of managing files and keep track of shows. And occasionally ask an indexer to find them.
Indexers are what actually search files. Jackett was the popular manager, Prowlarr is the new hotness and really simplifies the process a lot.
But bigger point being Sonarr, Radarr, and Prowlarr work together to find and manage files. They are only as good as what you set them up to do. Prowlarr can search 50+ torrent websites for a file at the same time if you set up all the integrations for those. It is better than any one website because it can search them all, even RarBG when it was up. It also works with NZBs and search them all at once. Then you set Sonarr and Radarr to the quality and type you want and they’ll pick from the search results automatically.
This actually isn’t true. You can configure sonarr and radarr to directly search indexers without using a wrapper. Most people use a wrapper so you only need to configure changes to your indexers from one place instead of updating sonarr,radarr,lidarr,readarr all individually
Still, at the end of the day a large part of what you get is what you have access too. Better indexers gets you more content
Is the manual search interface and experience better on Prowlarr? I don’t really need the automation part from Sonarr/Radarr but the mega search on Jackett is really useful for me.
Yeah, it’s pretty nice. Prowlarr is a straight up upgrade over Jackett from my experience. It even auto manages the indexers on all your arr instances for you.
I’ve exclusively used Sonarr/Radarr/Readarr for TV/Movies/Books and audiobooks for the past several years. Combined with a few usenet indexers and a decent usenet provider these programs are fantastic (fully automated other than selecting the content and speeds often max my gig connection). It does take a bit of reading and tweaking to get it all setup but I can’t recall the last time I couldn’t find content.
