Readarr tips?

AbsurdityAccelerator@lemmy.world to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 54 points –

I love my sonarr and radarr setup. But readarr seems to not be working so well. Is there a guide on how to get it to be more reliable in grabbing books? And while I am at it, how do I manage audio AND ebooks?

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how do I manage audio AND ebooks?

You need two versions of Readarr. Yes, that's just how it is. Just like if you wanted a 4K and non-4K radarr.

Butthurt people downvoting you for giving the right answer. It's frustrating, but it's cleanest to run two instances of Readarr for two formats (which is why it's best to run it in containers).

Interesting. Why would you want multiple version of a movie though?

If you're sharing with other people who don't have a 4K screen or don't have the bandwith to stream 4K, it uses a lot of system resources to transcribe 4K content down to something manageable, so some people find it easier to just keep two copies.

Readarr goes through fits of not working very well, usually linked to issues with the metadata provider. My tip would be to ditch it entirely and use LazyLibrarian instead. It's a lot more reliable, and has all of the same functionality.

Automation for books is kinda weird. It's not like a TV Series where new episodes come out every week. I wanted to like readarr but I don't see the utility. Anna's Archive and IRC are your best options.

I'd argue it would be more suited for weekly/monthly magazines.
But for books alone I'd prefer manual work and calibre to organize it.

I had to google IRC piracy because I couldn't believe this was still a thing in 2023. Seems super easy to use as well. And have been hearing about ZLib. Maybe I don't need book automation after all.

Semi-related, can these automations really be relied upon for quality, or is there a system to help find the best copy? When I'm downloading books I do it manually through Anna's Archive and I always download as many unique versions of a book that I see, then open them all and compare their internals to see which one I keep. Often not many ebooks are suitable for using my own font and layouts with Koreader.

Same. I wouldn't trust an automated system. There's too much variation between book releases. It isn't like downloading video.

To add to this currently Readarr metadata server is having issues and has been most of the month so you may find issues adding authors/books to your library that you had not already added.