One month ago I decided to give the 'Arrs a chance and, while there are issues and limits, i’am loving them.
But I have an issue: at home I have only internet access trough a 5G mobile network connection which means zero opportunity to have port forwarding or open ports at all. This rules out private torrent trackers (tried a couple, no luck in getting any ratio ofc). Public torrent trackers being basically shit, I decided to give Usenet a try, and two things happened:
- I started loving it!
- I discovered I have a 1tb/months full band with cap on my home connection. After that from 200mb/s I get dropped to 6mb/s this time, unlimited bandwidth.
I have a few suggestions first for newcomers: 'Arrs: start using them NOW. Also, they will help you organize your existing library, but be aware that doing a good job is not only mandatory but also time-consuming. Also, get JellyFin and it will play along with your organized (-- imean it) collection nicely. Make sure you set proper umask and group (media management/advanced settings for each arr app) do that the entire stack andbl jellyfin can write into your media collection: this will reduce issues with metadata sync a lot. Get bazarr working with subscene! And setup a nice nginx reverse proxy for the entire stack.
Some issues I ran into: Readarr really has issues with finding stuff and specially with audio books. Anybody could help me out here?
Lidarr seems always to go to torrent, which get stuck with no seeders for me. Is there music on Usenet?
Now to the last part: Usenet! That changed my entire game. As movies and TV series, I can literally find anything fast and saturated my 1tb plan in two days. I have newshosting and recently got eweka for less than 4€/month. Don’t get caught in the common lie of three months free: they always charge 15 month immediately so you cannot really test them out then cancel. As indexers I got NZBGeek and I am planning to seek out DrunkenSlug. Any suggestions here?
(I know newshosting and eweka are probably overlapping, getting both was a mistake, but a relatively cheap one)
One last question: audiobooks and music on Usenet: what is your experience?
One truly last question: any way to integrate soulseek (nicotine+) on the arr stack?
Thanks fellow sailors.
Unfortunatly I have the same experience as you regarding Readarr and audiobooks. I think one of the bigger issues is that audiobooks aren’t indexed a lot on usenet. Both indexera I use get close to no matches when I’m searching for even slightly more niche books (I find epubs all right, but no audiobooks). To solve the issue of finding stuff you would probably need a myanonymouse (private torrent tracker) invite or something, which has focus on audiobooks.
I also find that it syncs my library incorrectly to books (book A as book B, book B also as book B), which then are almost impossible to sort out, and even when it does find books that are monitored I need to manually import them nine times out of ten.
My somewhat best experience was to just DL audiobooks normally and dump them in a ”black hole” directory, and let readarr import them like that.
However, the other issues got to me and I jumped ship.
Hopefully it will become a more mature product in the future, but for now I’m staying to manual handling.