Just wanted to share my feelings about the arr* stack, will keep it short !
First, thanks to all those beautiful people giving their free time to work on all thoses services ❤️ !
At first I wasn’t that impressed and didn’t understood all the hype arround all thoses services and only used sonarr to rename my files I had manually imported. It did a great job as a file renamer service, however I was still managing everything manually from hard links to qbittorrent organization creating in the end a total messed up file system with a lot of duplicated hardlinks and files scattered in different directories, renamed differently, etc…
Also, after the most known french piracy tracker had been hacked and shut down (finally !), a lot of new trackers opened like wildfire and had over 10 trackers to keep an eye on. Searching the web, I came across Prowlarr and seeing how It connects directly to sonarr I got curious.
That’s the exact moment when I finally unsterstood what’s all the hype about the ARR stack ! My god, what an amazing piece of software stack…
First came jellyfin, sonaar, then prowlarr, radarr, seerr and now I discovered profilarr. It’s amazing to see how everything perfectly communicates with each part of the stack and everything is perfeclty automated and god does it work well… I’m impressed and still baffled how something so good is free and open source !!
Im still scratching the surface of this powerfull stack, but does it feel good to just ask seerr and after a few minutes having my media perfectly organized in qbittorrent, filesystem directories, renaming scheme, hardlinks, quality profiles, config synchronization… 💥🤯
It does have it’s own quirks right and there, and can become kinda weird if you do not know what you are doing (thanks Trash guides ❤️❤️) and seeing from all the issues the arr stack seems to hit a wall with the current code implementation. But IDK, i’m not a programmer so I may be wrong here.
And there seems always something new to complement the arr stack !
So that’s it :) Just wanted to share my feeling and appreciation with all of you ! Happy self-hosting !!
Yeah, I had the same feeling before I discovered how powerfull it is.
It’s not that hard to keep it well organized manually I guess, but you have to be very thorough and always keep the same structure when you do something ! I’m not at all an expert in scripting or programming on Linux and i’m relatively new in the Linux familly so I guess Im lacking a lot of basic skills in that matter.
I did appreciated my manual setup for a while. Also I did learned a lot of new things (what are inodes, files, hardlinks, softlinks, mount points, ffmpeg, mkvtools…) But now that I have that new basic knowledge I can take away this mental charge and just let it run whithout the need to overthink things !
I think it’s the best course of action for my learning Linux journey :)
Hold on, what do you mean by that?
The advantage of Jellyfin is that it understands different structures. Whatever format I download my media, as long as it is in the right parent folder, it gets picked up flawlessly.
I mean, you have to be very thorough when manually curating your medias.
All I do is have a tab constantly open for a torrent site, search a movie, click the magnet link, then pick my movies folder.
It gets a little trickier for other use cases but that’s pretty much it for most of the time
I’ve had some issues with it here and there actually. Most recently, teen titans loaded into jellyfin as a different entry for the series for each season and it didn’t get any of the names or order right. After the first two entries it just became easier to copy paste SE01EP and type the two numbers than it was to try and save the episode name. Jellyfin finds those itself anyways.