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Comment by nicoco | Hacker News Reader

Add prowlarr and bazarr for the full win.

the full win would also include 2 instances of readarr, once for ebooks and one for audio books, whisparr for your 18+ needs, stash for your 18+ needs frontend, and I think audiobookshelf and kavita to play the audiobooks and ebooks respectively. If you're into comics you might also want to throw mylar3 in there and if you have multiple users (aka a spouse and/or offspring) you may want to throw ombi in there too.

Some may prefer Overseerr to Ombi.

Indeed there are probably multiple paths to the full win. I like to use airsonic-advanced to feed music to my legacy sonos systems (can somebody please make an easy to use, pretty opensource alternative to the sonos multiroom software stack that can output to hifiberry's or ideally a cheaper alternative? even better would be an included best at each price level alternative speaker to double sided tape the hifiberry to). I also prefer to use beets and a cron job to convert my whole music collection into decent quality opus files and syncthing to get them onto my phone rather than using a frontend and mobile data to stream the flac files from my house.

Readarr is weird. Turned it off after I started get messages from it saying it was deleting my ebooks. I don't know why it can't just work like Sonarr.

Some additional recommendations:

- Setup two Radarr instances (normal and 4K) and two Sonarr instances (TV and anime)

- Follow the TRaSH guides to improve media quality

- Komga to read manga and comics

- Readarr Calibre integration to delegate parsing & metadata to Calibre

- Jellyseerr or Overseerr instead of Ombi

- Unpackerr to catch and handle compressed media

- autobrr if you’re looking to build ratio

Why use a separate instance for 4k? Can't you just use a separate quality profile? And why a separate one for anime? It seems unnecessary to me.

Pretty sure the 4k thing is a hard limitation due to not being able to select the same root path or something. I don't remember tbh.

For anime first time I've heard that suggestion but anime in general is super annoying to download due to not having real seasons or whatever often. Wonder how it helps..

I have a separate radarr for anime because there's are anime specific trackers that are much better for downloading anime, especially if you are looking for non-English subs, but radarr doesn't have a way to pick a specific tracker to download a particular series from. So my anime radarr instance only has those specific trackers on it so it will download from them everytime.

Which non-English subs do you look for? I try to look for Chinese subs and it’s been a struggle to find good tracker.

What might be easier than a whole separate Chinese tracker, Plex at least has a pretty robust feature where you can have it automatically find and download subtitles in whatever language you set. Only problem there is sometimes the timing is a little off with the actual video so the subs don't pop up at the right time, but you can change the offset with just a few clicks until it's right and then usually it's the same for every episode going forward.

If you're not using Plex or find it doesn't work so well for Chinese subs, can also try bazarr which does the same thing with subs but is a standalone software.

So with the above setup you can download the actual series from wherever and then it'll fetch Chinese subs for you and add them automatically. Otherwise for actual Chinese trackers try share.dmhy.org and mikanani.me for public trackers.

Feel free to shoot me an email(in my profile) if you need any advice or help setting anything up :)

For Radarr, it's for cleaner separation and easier automation. Also, keep in mind that you cannot have the same movie with two qualities on the same instance.

My 4K instance has one root path (different from non-4K) and one quality profile that's auto-selected by default. Using the Radarr connect option, I have a quality profile on the non-4K instance that automatically adds the movie to the 4K instance. This way, you can ensure you have both 4K and non-4K copies of certain movies (e.g., for external access/transcoding). You also ~never need to actually interact with the 4K instance. See this page for details: https://trash-guides.info/Radarr/Tips/Sync-2-radarr-sonarr/

For Sonarr, it's also for separation, but less of an issue if you're on Sonarr v4. The one thing you gain even on v4 is the ability to have different quality definitions for anime and non-anime content. See: https://trash-guides.info/Sonarr/Sonarr-Quality-Settings-Fil...

There are anime specific trackers that are better for downloading anime from, especially if you're looking for non-English subs, but radarr doesn't have a way to tell it to use a specific tracker for a particular series, so having a separate radarr instance with only those trackers on it ensures it downloads from them everytime.

With anime people are wayyy picker about release groups because they come part and parcel with fanmade translated subtitles, preference for which track is the default for dual-language releases, are all the honorifics written out, etc.

You either have to commit those preferences to a tag that you try to remember to put on everything (fiddly), or you just commit to them being on everything you download regardless of whether or not it is anime, which can cause weird selections when sonarr is sourcing western media.

Jesus christ. Thank you for the Unpackerr recommendation, that was pissing me off, but jesus christ.

I’d pay an extra $10/mo for my seedbox to have just a single interface for all of this without having to manage all these independent apps. Trying to debug why sonarr->prowlarr->flaresolvrr don’t work is a nightmare. That reminds me:

- flaresolverr: proxy that handles cloudflare bot checks for torrent trackers that are starting to put it up

Haha yeah, it can be definitely become a rabbit hole if you have the interest and time :)

I think the base setup of Radarr + Sonarr + SABnzbd/qBittorrent + Prowlarr is a huge improvemenet over doing things manually. A lot stuff on top of that is helpful, but the benefit vs. effort ratio diminishes quite quickly.

I haven't had to setup Flaresolverr just yet, but might do that soon.

I set up radarr + sonarr after a few years of doing it manually. Really glad I did — adding something from my phone and then having it pop into plex on my tv is delightful.

Why do you recommend Jellyseerr or Overseerr instead of Ombi?

Throw in bragibooks for parsing the audiobooks from readarr and adding metadata for audiobookshelf like chapters etc

Prowlarr is a deitysend. Instead of having to configure indexers in Sonarr, it does the heavy lifting for you. Goes in, configures an indexer, and that's your search setup done.

I would also prefer to manage my download clients from prowlarr but for some reason the maintainers are conceptually opposed to that.

How many indexers do you have for this to become a problem ? I never considered the indexer setup to be a pain point, genuinely curious.

Toss in RDClient for real-debrid support via the qbitorrent plugin in sonaar/radarr and it's fantastic.

I use Prowlarr as it’s tightly integrated with the *arr stack, but Jackett is another great option if you don’t need that.

What do prowlarr and bazarr do

Bazarr seems to be a subtitle downloader, and Prowlarr an “Index Manager” (though I’m unsure what that means).

Means you can say "Here's my API key for these private trackers" in one spot instead of 8. "Indexer Manager" is probably a better description.

Ooooooh.

Prowlarr is also important if you do multiple *arr. Sonarr, Radarr, Readarr. instead of configuring your indexers (multiple) in multiple places? You point the searches at Prowlarr and then keep it updated.

I personally run a fairly modified version HTPC on a QNAP (was synology but upgraded earlier this year - better base board + dedicated graphics card)

https://github.com/sebgl/htpc-download-box

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