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 !!
I'm kind of standing on the opposite side of the crowd in an identical soggy ditch as you. I set up the arr stack because I thought it was the next line of progression, instead I find out that the problems I was hoping to solve are endemic to the system and not the method. Using youtube-DLL to get all my music back left me with about two thousand files that MusicBrainz can't identify which means I'll have to play memory match annually for each one because I've never been good with remembering band names. Lidarr also doesn't recognize them and the ui is yet another list of steps I have to learn.
I was hoping prowlarr would be an upgrade to torrenting, I haven't had my finger on the pulse since 2013 and everything I knew is gone. Instead I only have access to trackers from the two torrent sites I already knew. If I couldn't find it myself then a bot looking for me isn't going to do better. Trusting a bot to not expose me is an even harder sell. I know the science, I know the method, but I'm old enough to remember all this being unreliable and that's a hard view to shake.
Sonarr and Radarr worked fine out if the box, but they didn't have anything to do as I already curated all my movies and shows. All they managed to do is rename a few obscure things to the wrong name. Try as I might, Sam and Max: Freelance Police doesn't exist as far as these things and jellyfin ate aware. I don't blame them, I'm still not entirely sure they're not some cognitohazard pretending to be a show myself.
I'm sure the vast amount of my problems are user error, I'm practically a luddite and I'm only getting into this to escape the corporate spying and endlessly fun tax our society has agreed is ok. If I could pay someone to set this up for me in homemade pickles, home repair, and DIY reptile habitats I'd do it in a heart beat.
Prowlarr isn't an alternative to torrenting, is the main thing. It's an indexer manager for the other arrs, which means it just does torrenting (or usenet) for you. You still want to be on high quality private trackers if using Prowlarr, it just means not needing to interface with 10 sites' search bars to look for something.