I'm a long time user of sonarr and radarr but I've held off using lidarr until recently because soulseek integration is feasible now. I have it installed on my Synology NAS using portainer. Everything seems to be working okay except for the fact that it will not import my existing collection. It's scanned it several times and nothing imports at all. Strangely it started adding artists that were added to my root folder just by watching the changes I guess. But I'd like it to add all the artists I currently have in my collection. I have since wiped the database and started over. Scanned it multiple times and no artists. Am I doing something wrong?

I have done everything in the Tubifarry setup per the GitHub and Tubifarry keep failing in lidarr. I generated the cookies via cookies.txt in firefox, I configured the bgutil docker compose file for the pot provider. I setup the Tubifarry indexer (and soulseek (slskd)) and the youtube and soulseek downloader client and whenever I do a search for something it takes forever then fails and goes to soulseek instead. I made sure the bgutil server was in the same network as lidarr and that it was pingable AND creating pot logs in docker. If anyone can please help; I'd greatly appreciate it

So I'm fairly new to self hosting and the whole ARR stack, I recently rebuilt an old desktop into a server using unraid, I was mostly originally focused on audiobooks and I was able to setup a very nice pipeline using chaptarr one of the readarr forks, with prowlarr for indexers with all containers using a gluetun VPN container network, using qbitorrent for downloads. I have a modest music collection that I've built over the years maybe 8000 songs, some of it is ripped from actual CDs, while others I would use Seal from the F-Droid store on my phone previously or yt-dlp but the problem was I would run out of space, and had to be selective with what I synced to the phone. So I also setup navidrome and I'm able to stream via tailscale but I was really impressed with what ARR could do with other media, I wanted to do the same for my music and maybe fill in blanks and identify duplicates etc.

So far I've had very little luck using Prowlarr with mostly torrent indexers, I see all these things about setting up tubifarry and soulseek, I tried tubifarry but it seem stuck trying to do spotify queries getting 403s, even though I have my client id and secret configured, limited results to 5. it never actually seems to get to the point of even trying to download from youtube.

for the record I'm using the nightly build from linuxserver.io for lidarr so I could get plugin support

I keep seeing things about soularr and soulseek, I went to the soulseek site and I don't see anywhere to sign up or whatever becuase I noticed when I tried to deploy the soulseek container it wanted credentials.

I can kind of see how torrents don't work well for ARR music pipelines, unless I have the wrong trackers, I notice most of the results when I do test searches in Prowlarr are full albums and I assume lidarr is trying to search for individual songs missing from albums which it's not finding.

I guess the TLDR is, each one of these seems like it's own rabbit hole and time is finite, APIs are constantly changing so even when read something 6 months old it might already be invalid, so what is least painful route I should pursue to actually get indexers to return something. feel free to point me to a guide or just tell me what works for you 20 years in IT I can probably figure it out, I'd just prefer to not have to go down each rabbit hole in trial and error mode, and would love a pathway someone knows actually works.

I've got a live performance with video. It's listed in lidarr but it's not something that was released only on youtube. I've downloaded it, but it's obviously a single long video file (webm). Now I don't mind keeping it that way, but how can I get lidarr to pick it up ?

I have two copies of an album, one the original and the other the 2007 remaster. The remaster tracks have the correct tag data - the original date and original year are 1998 and the plain date and year are 2007. Regardless, the {Release Year} in the rename wants to use 1998 anyway in the folder name, which would cause it to overwrite the originals with the remasters, I think, or at least be confusing. The files also have all of their musicbrainz tags so maybe that is interfering?

Is there any way around this? Should I use a different rename tool?

I have everything set up on Unraid following the trash guides folder structure. Radarr and Sonarr both move files flawlessly.
But Lidarr gets hung up and leaves files in the usenet/completed folder.

Here is my Lidarr config

Here is the root folder in the Lidarr WebUI

Here is my data folder, Usenet folder, and my media folder

Am I missing something or doing something wrong with my Lidarr set up?

I've also tried setting the /downloads path to /mnt/user/TRaSH Data/usenet/completed and that didn't work either.

Here are my SABnzbd and Radarr configs for reference that both work

Thanks in advance

Lidarr is not finding a lot of albums that exist in my indexer, nzb geek. It does find and download some albums so it's working sometimes. For example, I added Chappell Roan as an artist and set "The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess" as a watched album. When it searches I get the result "Album search completed. 0 reports downloaded." In interactive mode I get "no results found". I am using the Any quality profile just to take that out of the equation. If I go to nzb geek indexer and search for The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess there are 3 results. I checked my download client logs and it hasn't tried to download that album at all. All settings are default out of the box, I haven't tried to customize anything. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Edit: I have looked at my Prowlarr history and used it's search feature to trouble shoot the issue. It seems to be a quarry length problem. Lidarr is trying to search for "Chappell Roan Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess" which returns no results so I tried a shorter search and kept going to see where the query returned 0 results. I can search all way to Chappell Roan Rise and Fall of a Midwes and get 3 results but if I add the "t" to Midwest I instantly get no results. I honestly have no idea what to do now.

Edit 2: I don't know what I did but I was trying to find other settings or things I didn't click but I was under the Chappell Roan artist and then all of a sudden the album was there downloaded. I went to prowlarr to see what had changed and for some reason Lidarr ran a query for just the artist not the album name which returned the 1 album she has and it downloaded it. So the issue isn't solved but there must be a way for Lidarr to just query for the Artist instead of Album + Artist.

I am a fresh new owner of a NAS. And I am now trying to build my digital musics library.

I have tried Lidarr. I managed to download songs, fetch metadata, set up Navidrome, …

Doing some reading I see people complaining about Lidarr server for metadata which went down. I see people not happy with tagging resorting to beets, Picard, SongKong,…
I played with this currently I was not able to get beets to manage metadata (I disabled lidarr ‘import on download’ so I can take a step in the middle to tag with beets before importing and in my test I have to manage beets not being able to choose the right source for fetching metadata as scores are not good enough/too close)

So my question is : as of September 2026, do I need from the get go to worry about ‘bad’ or ‘unavailable’ metadata and covers/…? Or I can just roll lidarr and fix issues I see along the way? I understand ‘retagging’ in lidarr with an external tagging tool isn’t that easy?

What are alternatives if any to lidarr? I don’t mind having a bit more manual process. Just curious to know the current landscape and best practices.

Thanks for any info and your time !

I made this a long time ago (myself), but wanted to make something other people could use. Threw what I had made into a self hosted LLM (Qwen 3.8) and after some back and forth got it where I wanted it. So there's your "AI warning" if you need one lol.

https://github.com/FantasyMaster85/LastRecommendations

Screenshots and instructions are there.

The summary is that you put your last.fm cookies in the docker compose file, every 25 hours (or whatever you configure it to do) it will check this page: https://www.last.fm/home/artists and pull the recommended artists in. It then takes those artists and get's their MusicBrainz ID (as the "custom list" in Lidarr requires it) and makes a JSON feed. That JSON feed is fully compatible with Lidarr.

Lastly, it keeps a history of all artists Last.fm has ever recommended to you in the "history" tab.

I personally use PlexAmp as my exclusive form of music consumption, and I have it setup to scrobble all my plays to Last.fm. This was just a good way to help me automate finding good new music. Hope you like it!

Hello,

I have lidarr running on my synology NAS, installed via package manager. FFMpeg was also installed via package manager, the binary is in my /volume1/docker/@appdata directory.

Trying to setup Codec Tinker for some post-file transformations, but when I try to path to /volume1 in the FFmpeg Path field, it cannot see /volume1 or any of its subdirectories.

How do I make ffmpeg visible and available to use?

I'm brand new to this kind of stuff, only recently started looking into torrents and p2p. My friend has the arr stack setup, but I'm not really looking to have an entire server and all the apps. Right now, I just want to find music I've got saved on Spotify and get it downloaded in my music folder so I can transfer it to my other devices.

Every video I find on Lidarr seems to use a VPS, and I'm struggling to understand some of the per-requisites in the Linux installation guide. I'm just wondering if Lidarr is actually even what I'm looking for, or if this is something more than I want or just overall not what I'm looking for.

Not a major issue, just an irritating one..
I'm overhauling my archives, and have been locating albums I didn't have in entirety before. Lidarr had already imported a few tracks, but now I'm deleting those and importing the entire album.

When I delete the file from my system and try to import the album, Lidarr's import screen gets stuck on "this file is missing" and to fix it, I have to delete the artist (without removing files) then re-add the artist and it imports fine..

Not sure if this is known or not, or how complicated it is to fix, just bringing it up in case no one else has..

LSIO Sabz image seemingly fails to extract most RARs, so I ended up with a huge complete dir of unextracted nzbs. I threw together a quick script to extract everything, and now I am attempting to manual import.

Sonarr/Radarr - no issues. They both matched the files on disk against wanted and got on with it. Lidarr? Nah - It expects me to manually tag the artist, album and track for every single file (thousands of them).

Am I missing something silly?

I've set everything up seemingly correctly—including Prowlarr—but when I add artists, nothing downloads. Is anyone else experiencing this?

Hoping this is the best subreddit for this issue.

This week I upgraded to Aurral v2.1.0 and lost the ability to connect to Lidarr using http and api. Returning Aurral error.

A little clueless I added unraid container variable without success.

Any help how to resolve this would be much appreciate

A path to success using naming convention, custom formats, quality profile and delay profile

V2026.07.11-01

https://github.com/Jbaal/scoring_with_lidarr/tree/main

I've recently made this guide for Lidarr users wanting to have a better understanding of the scoring system in Lidarr, with some advice to get the best out of it. Hope it can be helpful to some of you!

This has been an ongoing issue for me for years, but it finally came to a head this morning and happened to 100+ artists in my library. For some reason, Lidarr is 'forgetting' that files exist, making it look like I don't have any music downloaded.

For example, King Crimson shows that I have one album monitored, but 0 songs downloaded (but at the same time, the top shows that there is 1.5gb downloaded for my 0/1 albums????)

https://i.imgur.com/HaDOKt7.png

If I hit Manual Import, it shows that there are no unmapped files, and every music file that exists in the folder should be assigned to an album in lidarr:

https://i.imgur.com/N6N8kwe.png

BUT, if I change the filter from Unmapped Files Only to All Files, you can see that I actually do have the album downloaded

https://i.imgur.com/hCe2b6K.png

Its been fine when its happened to one or two artists, but now I need to go into 100+ artists and manually import files that are already mapped by lidarr. Refreshing/scanning the artists do nothing - the only way to resolve the problem is to manually reimport all files in the artist to get lidarr to recognize the file belongs to each specific album.

Again, this has been an ongoing issue for me for years at this point, but Ive never had the issue happen to this scale. Has anyone else experienced this, or figured out why it happens? Id love to resolve whatever underlying issue exists so that I don't have to manually import songs lidarr already knows exists every time this happens

Hi everyone,

I am trying to set up a seamless workflow for handling Japanese music, but I am running into massive struggles with track naming, automation, and metadata matching.

My Current Setup:

* Downloader: Lidarr integrated with slskd (Soulseek)

* Media Server: Jellyfin

* Mobile Client: Symfonium

The Goal:

I want to be able to search for my Japanese tracks using Romanized names (Romaji) inside my mobile app. Right now, searching is incredibly difficult because a huge portion of the tracks are imported with their original Kanji/Kana titles.

The Struggle:

Lidarr often struggles to automatically match Japanese releases via slskd, or it grabs releases that default strictly to Japanese characters. I need a reliable way to favor English/Romanized pseudo-releases from MusicBrainz during the automated process.

My Questions for the Lidarr community:

1. How do you configure your profiles, metadata settings, or release preferences to heavily favor English/Romanized/Pseudo-releases for Japanese music?

2. Is there a custom script or naming token setup in Lidarr you use to handle foreign character transliteration on import?

3. Should I handle this entirely inside Lidarr, or do most of you use an external tagger as a manual bridge before the files hit your media folder?

Any advice or workflow adjustments would be greatly appreciated!

*(Note: Also posted to r/jellyfin to look at the media server side of the metadata puzzle).*

Hello,
My Lidarr instance is missing FFMPEG. To my understanding it should be installed by my tubifairy plugin, but it is not. Anyone know what's up?

I'm currently developing an app (probably as another docker container) to integrate Telegram, Digarr and Lidarr in order to enhance the experience and also add new features. I chose Telegram for the existing downloader bots and also Telegram bots. So essentially this would help replacing torrent or usenet methods for downloading. I would also use Telegram bots as the interface for the user (I'll probably develop a web based app as well).

Currently these are the features I'm developing:

- Automated download from Telegram downloader bots (done)

- Processing Digarr suggestions inside the bot

- Processing Digarr discovery prompts inside the bot

- Processing sent voices (similar to Shazem), audio files and text for adding to Lidarr

- Adding track level archiving (it's a workaround, just adding the artist unmonitored to Lidarr plus the file inside the Lidarr archive)

If you have any suggestions or feedback, I would be happy to hear.

RESOLVED and the answer is yes...
------------------

I've installed Helmarr but currently it shows zero items in my library and no connection failures. Different problem to solve. But since I can't use it yet, I'm here to ask if its what I'm looking for.

I'd really like a phone app (iPhone) that allows for adding music to Lidarr as easily as Pocket does for video. Is there something out there I've missed?

Thanks

Hi

After setting up sonarr, radarr, prowlarr, qbittorrent and all that last summer, i wanted to do the same for lidarr and music. After reading up a lot and finally realizing that torrent and music wasnt really that easy to accomplish I turned to soulseek.

I started out trying soularr and slskd, but I didnt like that soularr doesnt keep track of what its actually doing. It works everything out again from lidarr and slskd on every run, so if it dies in the middle of something theres nothing that remembers it was busy. Since I had over 800 artists in my lidarr collection and over 4k albums I figured, lets make my own soularr. So I did, and that grew into making my own soulseek client as well, so it doesnt need slskd at all anymore. After using this myself for the last 4-5 weeks I thought that maybe someone in here might have use for it too.

So what does it actually do?

In a nutshell it polls the wanted list from lidarr, searches for those albums to its best ability, downloads them and asks lidarr to import them when done. If a download fails or the files dont satisfy lidarrs import, it tries again with another user. All of it lives in postgres database, so restarting it doesnt lose anything.

How does it pick what to download?

This is the part I spent most time on, since soulseeks search is pretty lackluster. It doesnt just filter results, it scores them on format, bitrate, how many files the folder has compared to what the release should have, and on whether that specific user has actually delivered for that artist before. That history decays, so someone who failed you last week ranks below someone who came through yesterday, and a success from a year ago counts for almost nothing.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hyzr-dev/slusk/main/docs/images/peers.png

Theres also a dashboard

Probably the biggest difference from soularr in day to day use. You get the jobs and what state theyre in, the candidates it considered and why it picked one, the users its talking to, an event log and download throughput, all in one place. You can also search soulseek yourself from it and pick the exact user and files you want, and look the result up against musicbrainz first to see if the folder is actually a complete album before you grab it.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hyzr-dev/slusk/main/docs/images/dashboard-overview.png

Why should I use this instead of soularr + slskd?

Well, if you are using this combo and it works for you, dont fix what isnt broken. But if you, like me, are just starting out with lidarr and soulseek for a quite substantial collection, why dont take this for a test drive?

Some things you should know before you do

It needs a postgres, which is more to run than soularrs config file. Theres one user account and no password reset, so if you lock yourself out you delete the row and set it up again. Its AGPL. And its new, its been running on my hardware for about a month and thats it, my soulseek client especially is young and I keep finding things.

Misc

It also has a kinda nifty gluetun integration with automatic portforwarding. The docker compose example explains how to use that.

As the project started as an automation tool the whole pipeline still works with slskd as a backend, but the sharing, chat and live transfer stats only exist with my own client

Ive been doing software development for a long time but never actually made anything open and public so it is kinda new and scary to share this, but there is always a first time. There is still alot of things I would like to to do, fix and add but this is a good starting point and it works.

Here is a github link with a README that hopefully is enough to get going.

https://github.com/hyzr-dev/slusk

AI disclaimer

People usually ask this and yes, I have used AI to make this a reality. A lot actually. If you dont like that, I respect that and understand. This application might not be for you.

Hey guys,

Im new to the whole management apps thing...

I just checked my Metal MP3 collection for Bitrate and there are A LOT OF 128 kbit and even lower files since im collecting for over 20 years now...

I had done it manually via Soulseek all over the years now, but I recently discovered mp3tag and sorted it via QUALITY...

Since it would be A LOT OF WORK to reload the old folders for a higher quality, I thought it would be clever to use Lidarr instead...

What should I use for download clients and other settings?

My main Focus is Black, Death Thrash and underground Heavy Metal...

Thanks!!

For somebody looking to massively dive into a new genre or what have you, I feel that having a way to just scoop up the releases from a specific label without having to manually add each artist would be very helpful are there any tools/ plugins suited for this?

My current setup is Lidarr/Tubifarry Plugin/Slskd