Comment by Cyph0n
4 days ago
Indeed. The other thing to point out is that, once you have set them up, they will chug along fine for years with near zero input.
Here is the stack I recommend:
* Radarr (movies) with optional second instance for 4K versions
* Sonarr (shows) with optional second instance for 4K versions
* Sonarr (anime), separate instance to have control over quality settings
* Prowlarr (tracker/indexer management)
* SABnzbd (Usenet)
* qBittorrent (torrents)
I would also recommend consulting the TRaSH guide to tune your setup and ensure you’re grabbing quality releases. From there, the next logical step is Profilarr :)
I have this stack for 1 year and had 0 issues, 0 maintenance. It just werks.
Im having problem on some new releases where it downloads clear malware with. Exe files, its detecting it and not moving them to my jellyfine storage but it always requires manual intervention. I havent been able to find a way to stop sonarr from grabbing releases before their official releas and with n amount of seedwrs/leechers
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> I would also recommend consulting the TRaSH guide to tune your setup
Yes and no. E.g. I find Trash guide to quality profiles/settings useless. I wish *arr apps shipped with decent modern quality by default. No, I'm not downloading and watching a Quantum Quality UXZHD Post-Partum HDR BVIU-49.3 format. No one is.
E.g. profilarr pulls in a more sane set of profiles: https://dictionarry.dev/quality-profile
TRaSH is definitely for power users. It becomes much easier to work with when configured with Recyclarr, but there is still a learning curve.
One of the most valuable things for me is the ability to rank different aspects of releases across media types. For example, I prefer dual audio anime, unless the sub is much higher quality. Same idea for surround sound and release groups. I also want to ignore things like dual audio that is non-English, or hardcoded French subs, etc.
> It becomes much easier to work with when configured with Recyclarr
I tried it once, and it just polluted the profiles with dozens of Trash Guide profiles :)
So I went with Profilarr which has sensible setups like "2160p Quality" etc.
> One of the most valuable things for me is the ability to rank different aspects of releases across media types.
Oh, this is something I tried to setup as well, and failed. It doesn't help that IIRC languages are not properly indexed/set up in ^arrs if I remember. Like you have to set "language = 53" for English or something like that.
I think all this complexity is down to the fact that ^arr apps grew organically on top of other things that grew organically, so the data models are all screwed up, and no one has the time or knowledge to clean it up and make better.
Instead of multiple Radarr and Sonarr instances, wouldn't it be simpler to have multiple quality profiles on a single instance?
Multiple instances are needed if you want multiple versions of a given movie or episode. For example, I have a Dolby Vision device that works great with certain files, but on some other devices the file works poorly and doesn't transcode well. Plex handles multiple files fine.
Definitely not a usecase for everyone
The arrs have extensive and solid capabilities for filtering for the quality you want, but they don’t really offer the ability to manage multiple qualities for one specific item.
It’s also nice to have them separated because you can set up distinct plex libraries mapped to the sonarr and radarr 4K media directories. I don’t give everyone access to 4K content because no matter how many times I explain direct play, some people just seem to love transcoding to 720p. So I can limit 4K library access on plex and disable transcoding altogether for plex content.
I also don’t want every item I add in both 4K and 1080p.
Obviously the instance is to hide away from wife, kids and rest of the family. I recommend stashapp.
I have a setup where I tag kids friendly movies with a specific radarr and sonarr tag. It gets written to the NFO so it trickles down to Jellyfin. The kids have their own Jellyfin account that can only see assets with that tag. It’s extremely simple to setup https://blog.tiserbox.com/posts/2025-03-01-parental-control-...
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+1. Many people do not see the value in storing their own adult content but mine is high quality, full length, VR, niche, and full of the stuff and actresses I like.
Or you could be considerate and set them up with their own instances (of stash), too!
Curious question, I host a single instance of sonarr that supports anime through tags. Is there an advantage to hosting 2 instances instead?
Single instance works fine, but a separate instance allows you to set global quality settings that are more accurate for anime: https://trash-guides.info/Sonarr/Sonarr-Quality-Settings-Fil...
You can configure quality profile via the tags too (I do have separate profiles for anime vs liveaction). I didn't even set the tag, as I don't intermingle them in the same directory, and automatic tagging by sub path is possible too
So I'm also surprised why someone would configure a second instance for that
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sabnzbd can be replaced with nzbdav or similar tools (infinidysk, altmount) if you want to free up storage and stream directly from usenet.
Or, even better, the entire arr stack can be replaced with stremio to just keep everything on-demand instead of curating a library at all.
“Even better” is relative. Some people like having media stored locally instead of relying on torrent streaming availability.
Usenet streaming sounds cool, but with releases being DMCAd so frequently, I don’t see how it would be practical for anything but the most recent content.
Also, I imagine that Stremio without Debrid (or equivalent) is kind of a terrible experience most of the time.
I tried it once and it barely worked at all. Plex would just show everything as unavailable. Really awful experience even when it did work.
If you're not worried about black-ish pixels, it's surprisingly reliable.
> stremio
Is this the latest rendition of Popcorn Time?
Yep basically. The real magic is when you combine it with a Debrid service, which essentially puts a cache in front of torrents. If the torrent has been downloaded before, you get a direct hosted stream instead of having to stream your movie from active seeders (i.e. buffering hell).
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With agents I am surprised nobody has combined Plex + qbittorrrent + seerr + *arr into one mega app
There is, it was an Android app called Popcorn Time.
Quite a feat considering it was developed without AI help.
There are a million docker-compose files floating around for exactly this that just need a little bit of configuration.
You still have to navigate through a bunch of different interfaces. I'm talking about micro services vs monolith
I actually prefer the separation. Limited blast radius is one advantage, but I also think that the media server and downloader should be separate things anyways.
But I do think that there is an opportunity to merge Sonarr and Radarr.
That app would be blatantly illegal
How would that app be illegal when its constituent components are 100% legal?
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This is all hypothetical, isn't it...? All academic?
The interfaces of arr stack are ugly, and linking qbit to indexer manager to arr app is needlessly complex. Maybe there could be plugins in one app like qbit.
I used to think so too, but now I usually just have Muse or another AI agent on my box do those things for me. I should maybe create a slimmed down API first *arr stack equivalent then hmm
Sonarr just got a big UI upgrade FYI
Prowlarr replaces Jackett?
https://github.com/Jackett/Jackett
Yeah, it interfaces way better with Radarr/Sonarr. I still run Jackett though, good for manual searches.