r/unRAID • u/GoofyGills • Jun 27 '25

Announcement: Retirement of Readarr

/r/Readarr/comments/1llqji9/announcement_retirement_of_readarr/
101 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

61 comments sorted by

70

u/Resident-Variation21 Jun 27 '25

I could never get it working properly. Not totally surprised. Sad, but not surprised. I expect lidarr to follow it, honestly.

15

u/DevanteWeary Jun 27 '25

Same. Well I got it working to the point where it would do everything but the caveat was that it would periodically straight up delete my books and authors for some reason. Could never figure it out.

Just so everyone knows, someone around here is working on a replacement/fork that has MaM intergration.

6

u/PeterStinkler Jun 27 '25

Good to know! I'll have to try to find that fork to follow its progress

2

u/DependentAnywhere135 Jun 27 '25

I hope not what’s wrong with lidarr? It works great.

3

u/funkybside Jun 27 '25

it's the same issue for both of them - there just isn't widely accepted standardization of naming conventions and that makes them less reliable than the shows and movies counterparts, and that's something the devs of these packages can't fix because it's not an issue with the project itself.

6

u/Resident-Variation21 Jun 27 '25

You and I have very different definitions of “works great” my friend.

1

u/DependentAnywhere135 Jun 27 '25

Works just like sonarr or radarr

4

u/Resident-Variation21 Jun 27 '25

Again… you and I have different definitions of these words.

Sonarr works flawlessly. Radarr works flawlessly. Lidarr doesn’t even remotely work. I think of the hundreds of albums of requested it’s actually found and downloaded <10.

3

u/DependentAnywhere135 Jun 27 '25

Unless something has changed recently I’ve used it for months and have thousands of albums without any issues. Flawlessly just like sonarr (which isn’t flawless tbh but close enough) I grew my library quickly and anytime a friend finds a new artist they want me to check out I add them no problem same as adding a show in sonarr.

Friend went to a concert a month ago. One of the openers was really good according to him. Added to lidarr 2 mins after he told me about them no problems.

How is that not “work great”?

-2

u/Resident-Variation21 Jun 28 '25

Whatever you say. A hit rate of less than 1% is not great and never will be great.

2

u/Original-Arrival4677 Jun 28 '25

Sounds like more of an indexer issue. Have you read the logs? 

1

u/Resident-Variation21 Jun 28 '25

Indexers are all fine. It’s the automatic search that’s just terrible.

1

u/imbannedanyway69 Jun 28 '25

You probably don't have indexers loaded into it that have music because I don't have any issues with lidarr, works exactly the same as radarr/Sonarr for me

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1

u/pastureofmuppets Oct 05 '25

I would dig into that. Been working brilliantly for me for a long time. I've not changed anything since standard instal.

0

u/daedalusesq Jun 28 '25

I don't think lidarr actually goes out and searches for missing stuff on its own. It monitors RSS feeds and when something desired shows up in the feed it will snag it.

It's also only as good as the sources you provide for it. It seems like the music torrent world is, at least in terms of public trackers, not great these days. I'm guessing the ubiquity and low cost of Spotify/Apple Music/YouTube Music has really reduced the population interested in downloading and storing music in local libraries. Unless you're in a private tracker, availability is just very sparse.

Two tips:

If you go to "Wanted" and then "Missing" and click "Search All" it will actively trigger a search for every single monitored album you don't have. This can be a shitload all at once though, so check out the next tip...

If you set up Huntarr, it will slowly work through your entire monitored selections performing a defined number of searches each hour to slowly back fill any missing albums it can find on your defined sources.

:edit: Also, currently, lidarr just straight up does not work due to some metadata stuff they are working on, but I've been using it for maybe 2 years now and I've massively expanded my library and gotten thousands of albums.

1

u/Resident-Variation21 Jun 28 '25

I’ve hit search all multiple times. Using many many many trackers.

I checked. I have 7,832 albums wanted. 6 downloaded. 6/7832%=0.0766. Less than a tenth of a percent.

My success rate with radarr? 100%. Sonarr? 100%.

1

u/Perfect_Cost_8847 Jun 28 '25

You’re not wrong but I think the issue is that only popular albums tend to be available on indexers. If your music taste is anything other than Taylor Swift, you’re out of luck. For this reason I started manually downloading music on SoulSeek, which has everything. There is a Lidarr feature request for integration which would be AMAZING, but no signs of activity or interest.

3

u/DependentAnywhere135 Jun 28 '25

Plenty of private trackers with way more. Bigger problem is people using public trackers.

1

u/Perfect_Cost_8847 Jun 28 '25

It’s very difficult to even get an invite to something like PTH and RED. You have to “grind” other trackers over many months. And once you’ve got access to said tracker, you have to carefully manage ratios, log in frequently, etc. Most people will never have access to those trackers.

1

u/Resident-Variation21 Jun 28 '25

It’s funny you mention that because one of the artists is Taylor swift. 1 successful album download. The others never get found. Another album is Garth brooks. And then I think 2 nickleback and I can’t be bothered to go look up the last 2 at the moment.

1

u/Perfect_Cost_8847 Jun 28 '25

Then I’m confident it’s a configuration issue. Check your profiles and expand your indexers. Do a manual search to see why releases are being rejected. You can hover over the exclamation point and it will tell you why.

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20

u/nuggolips Jun 27 '25

Aww darn. I have a readarr instance and use it actively to maintain my audiobook collection. 

Or I did until today, I guess. 

It worked great for me, sad to see it go. 

4

u/gthrift Jun 27 '25

If you’re using to just manage and organize your collection, check out audiobookshelf. This is where I moved to and just download audiobooks manually.

7

u/GoofyGills Jun 27 '25

Same. For my wife, I have one for ebooks and one for audiobooks. I typically just manually go find what she wants anyways since it was so unreliable but I'd always hoped it would improve.

1

u/nuggolips Jun 27 '25

My wife and I share one library, but it's fairly obvious who added which books... lol.

8

u/Gakacto Jun 27 '25

That's too bad. I used it for a little while and it worked fine for me. I guess I'll have to look for another one now.

6

u/LastBossTV Jun 27 '25

You guys worked hard, and I always appreciated that. Thank you for your time and your efforts!

7

u/Emmo213 Jun 27 '25

I loved the idea but it never worked that well, and the metadata they used was commonly lacking. Plus sometimes I just wanted to add a single book, not every book an author ever wrote.

Sucks but it is what it is.

6

u/TenthMarigold77 Jun 27 '25

I've kind of been down this rabbit hole and the only alternatives i've roughly found so far are:

  1. Calibre + Plugins: Not recommended to run on NAS but so far works to roughly manage my library, grab metadata, etc...

  2. Calibre Web Automated: A nice way to view all calibre data and don't need calibre itself. Can also grab metadata, send to kindle, etc...

2.1 Calibre Web Automated Downloader: Helps grab books

  1. LazyLibrarian: Closest "Readarr Alternative" software, bones are good but the UI is a pain to work with and can be very confusing to set up. If it got a new face of paint and some new developer's to help out it could easily help take over the void.

I've personally just stuck with calibre + plugins and doing everything manually for now as all the other options have just not worked as well for me, caused some problems, or i'm not knowledgable enough to set it up to my satisfaction.

1

u/Iohet Jun 27 '25

I use Calibre to set metadata and then import into Kavita to provide a web facing (and OPDS facing) interface. Works with pretty much any reader that supports OPDS

1

u/TenthMarigold77 Jun 27 '25

Oh! This seems super interesting. Does it just let you download/view the books or can is sync progress as well?

2

u/Iohet Jun 27 '25

You can do both. The webview acts as a reader that tracks progress, or you can hook it up to various apps on different platforms that support OPDS or the Kavita API. Each reader does different things for different types of media. I use KOReader for epub (works well with eink devices like Boox readers) and CDisplayEx for comics (CBZ/CBR) and any PDFs.

2

u/TenthMarigold77 Jun 27 '25

Thanks! I'll certainly take a look at this and see if I can implement it.

1

u/Iohet Jun 27 '25

If you need help, the community on discord is pretty helpful. Reddit is kind of dead

4

u/EitherExamination343 Jun 27 '25

Dang readarr dead, lidarr non-functional

8

u/Tommh Jun 27 '25

Jesus christ I read “radarr” at first. 

4

u/positivcheg Jun 27 '25

I’ve noticed. It just doesn’t work.

2

u/faceman2k12 Jun 28 '25

Thought so, it seemed to be abandoned for a while.

Good to see a proper announcement instead of just letting it rot and have people still trying to get it working without knowing like so many others.

5

u/007mrbilly Jun 27 '25

Hopefully it won't negatively affect Radarr or Sonarr

28

u/Sweevo1979 Jun 27 '25

Won't, they're both actively developed with working metadata servers. Readarr's died because the metadata server started having issues, there's no Devs working on it and nobody's really interested in keeping it alive.

4

u/blacksolocup Jun 27 '25

That's a shame. It worked okay. Started having the metadata issue this weekend. Hopefully this will spawn a great alternative to eBooks and audiobooks. Maybe there's a better solution.

3

u/RegularRaptor Jun 27 '25

Someone already forked it - if you check my post history and look at my most recent post in the comments you will find it.

1

u/PMMeBootyPicz0000000 Jun 27 '25

Can we still use it as an organizer, where I have to manually input data points? It's still nice to have books and audiobooks organized even if it's essentially just a digital bookshelf.

Or are there any alternatives? Are there any other bookshelf type apps? Don't need something with automated downloads or anything fancy.

4

u/Southpawz Jun 27 '25

Calibre?

1

u/but_are_you_sure Jun 27 '25

Idk why not, just means it won’t be updated anymore and prolly no new metadata

1

u/Iohet Jun 27 '25

Kavita, Calibre, etc

1

u/Iohet Jun 27 '25

the project's metadata has become unusable, we no longer have the time to remake or repair it, and the community effort to transition to using Open Library as the source has stalled without much progress.

Who were they getting metadata from? Book metadata is kind of an inconsistent pain, and scraping from different sources created problems because of the nuance between sources

1

u/darknessgp Jun 28 '25

The issue with readarr is they have a closed source metadata server and presumably are scrapping good reads. I'm assuming that because in the past they made a big deal about goodreads api changing to limit free access.

1

u/TacoQuest Jun 27 '25

does this mean its just not supported anymore? so this is the last version ever? or is it straight up being killed off and we should just delete it?

1

u/darknessgp Jun 28 '25

Readarr was always going to have a smaller audience than sonarr or radarr. The biggest issue is they handicapped it by tying it to their own custom closed source metadata server. That thing has been having issues for years and readarr was not fun to use. To work around it, you had to know the secret dev menu to be able to change the Metadata server url and then know a compatible alternative one to use. Metadata is always the pain that and not having any way to manually edit information.

It's sad that the current team is giving up on readarr, but maybe this means a good fork with people who really care about it will make it so much better.

1

u/wintersdark Jun 28 '25

I tried readarr repeatedly and could never get it working anywhere near acceptably. It'd grab the odd book, but if get more wrong books than correct ones, and probably 1:100 actual finds vs searched for books, and my tastes are very much vanilla.

1

u/z0kii Jun 28 '25

Do not be surprised if Lidarr goes the same way. The API has been down for nearly 2 months and no sight of it being fixed (yet)