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 !!
One of the biggest advantages to me is that my friends and family can go into Seerr and click “I want this show” and it will magically appear in a few minutes without my intervention. Also, for TV shows specifically sonarr will automatically get new episodes for series that you’re subscribed to
Yeah that’s one thing that could benefit me but my tv show preferences change. If a new season drops but it has bad ratings, I don’t get it.
I also would want to pick the quality/size of the file depending on the show (good shows deserve better quality).
Tv show seasons/episodes can be subscribed individually, and you can change behavior e.g. ‘stop after this season’.
You can set up quality preferences per show and even more complicated choosing with a lot of regex, and it actually works very well. If you do it this way and enable upgrading, the media will also automatically get its quality upgraded when something “better” comes out.
“TRaSH guides” has a lot of regex that can be copied from, and I also have a ton of my own preferences codified.
The core arr stack (radar, sonarr, optionally seerr) is generally just a really smooth way to handle everything at the cost of an initial learning curve. Maybe overkill for some people, but I think it’s a straight upgrade if you set it up right
I do all that with sonarr. Custom quality profiles with size ranges to look for depending on the resolution wanted and quality profile selected.
You can also tell it to only keep specific episodes, or seasons. I only keep the first 10 seasons of The Simpsons as example. Or The Daily Show, I only keep the last 10 new episodes.
Entirely possible with Seer (and also directly in Sonarr I think)! Don’t want to convert you though. If what you are doing is working for you, that’s great.
I do this too and that was a major hesitation in switching to use arrstack. What I do is each library (movies, TV) has an organized folder (Archive) and a folder for arrstack (Active). I have both added to arrstack and Plex/jellyfin but I only let it download automatically to the arr folder. Every week or two I check what people have requested and downloaded into the arr folder and either move it to the archive since I’m happy with the quality / release group, or I use arr’s ui to pick a different release with a single click.
It’s nice because I get the best of both worlds, hands free downloading for 10-15 people, new episodes daily, but I also get to screen and control what goes into my archive and upgrade important shows before I lose track of it.
Sonarr accommodates season un/monitoring and show-level quality profiles covering source, resolution and/or bitrate.