Exactly the title. I’m researching having a jellyfin server and downloading media seems like it would be tedious (the way I’ve done it once or twice previously). I could use some clarity on what Sonarr is, what it looks like (like is there a GUI?? I’m too stupid to run something off of a terminal), and how it works. I’m familiar with torrenting but not with usenet, and I use the megathread from this community. Can someone explain Sonarr/Radarr to me in a way that would be understandable to someone at my level of understanding?
Others have explained it well. Just want to add a recommendation to use the trash guides (https://trash-guides.info/) to configure these apps. You can use Notifiarr to sync these changes automatically too
If you aren’t already self-hosting services and aren’t really comfortable with command line, you might want to look at something like CasaOS and this video: https://youtu.be/QfpZcXXGpVA
I watched it several times when building my stack and still go back to it from time to time.
Ultimately, Sonarr and Radarr take away the tedium of running your media server. You tell it what you want, it does the work of finding, obtaining, naming, and sorting. Then Jellyfin picks it up automatically. Jellyseerr, as others have said, puts a nice shiny coat of paint on it.
Sonarr lets you create a list of TV shows you want, and it automatically searches for episodes from sources you specify (eg. Bittorrent, Usenet) and passes them to your download client(s), and organizes all of the media files.
Radarr does the same thing for movies.
You manage them both with a web interface. Installing and setting them up requires technical steps, but there are guides.
I will add, I find the interfaces for these very obtuse, but there’s frontends like Ombi and Jellyseerr that let you more easily manage what you want to see.
Oooh, I should check that out. I’ve been using sonarr for over a year now, but the ui still comfuses me some times.
Radarr (Movies) / Sonarr (Shows/Series) - You search for a movie/show, you hit the “I want that” button, it does the searching through Torrents or Usenet, once it find a match it send a signal to your download client to begin downloading, once done Radarr/Sonarr will take that file and neatly manage it for your media viewer (Jellyfin) essentially automating the entire process.
There is quite a bit of configuration needed for things start to flow smoothly but relatively straight forward.
Radarr is for movies, Sonarr is for TV. You tell Sonarr which TV shows you want in your library, and then Sonarr automatically searches the torrent sites or usenet sites that you specified in your settings to find the episodes. There are a whole bunch of settings you can tweak to tell Sonarr what you consider to be a “good” file, so when Sonarr automatically searches, it finds the best version available for each episode. When it finds those good files, it automatically passes them to your torrent client (like qBittorrent) for download. When the files finish downloading, Sonarr automatically creates a copy of the file and renames the copy in a way that makes it super easy for Jellyfin to find the metadata. When it creates this copy, it uses a special kind of copying called “hardlinking” which makes it look like two copies, but only take up the space of one file. This has the advantage of having one folder for raw downloads and another for your actual media library, so you can easily keep seeding files while also having a version of the files you can rename for metadata purposes.
Even if you don’t use Radarr/Sonarr for downloading, they are still pretty useful for media management.
The other comment has a pretty good explanation. But its important to know that its really difficult to get it working without access to some private trackers. The normal free ones will start giving you issues with file quality, naming, or not finding anything. This only gets worse if you want anime and even worse again for dubbed.
Sonarr/Radarr were originally designed for Usenet, and work best with it.
You can eliminate low quality, cams, and other crappy files by tweaking the quality profiles and setting exclusion filters. I mostly use private trackers but occasionally still get stuff from places like TPB and hardly ever encounter issues this way.
I beg to disagree, except maybe for the naming of some files on some trackers.
With the right settings all this can be avoided even on free trackers
The main Sonarr page has a good overview, and Radarr is basically the same thing except for movies.
I’ll just add, have a look at overseerr as well. It has has the same interface style for searching TV/Movies in a single interface, it then pushes the requests out to the correct *arr stack be that sonarr or radarr
I like the recommended page in overseerr much more tha what is in the other *arr apps
Overseerr doesn’t seem to be developed much anymore. Technically, these are for request management and for general search you would use prowlarr. In reality, if you don’t want to play administrator for other users using Sonarr or radarr directly is easier and more reliable. You can tell that the whole stack was created by random disjointed developers and not a main UX designer because everything about it is very obtuse.
I am a full convert to UseNet at this point! Let the Lamer’s do the torrenting
