cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/47871600
(I am not affiliated with the project at all, just an end user.)
Announcement: Retirement of Readarr
We would like to announce that the Readarr project has been retired. This difficult decision was made due to a combination of factors: 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.
Third-party metadata mirrors exist, but as we’re not involved with them at all, we cannot provide support for them. Use of them is entirely at your own risk. The most popular mirror appears to be rreading-glasses.
Without anyone to take over Readarr development, we expect it to wither away, so we still encourage you to seek alternatives to Readarr.
Key Points
- Effective Immediately: The retirement takes effect immediately. Please stay tuned for any possible further communications.
- Support Window: We will provide support during a brief transition period to help with troubleshooting non metadata related issues.
- Alternative Solutions: Users are encouraged to explore and adopt any other possible solutions as alternatives to Readarr.
- Opportunities for Revival: We are open to someone taking over and revitalizing the project. If you are interested, please get in touch.
- Gratitude: We extend our deepest gratitude to all the contributors and community members who supported Readarr over the years.
Thank you for being part of the Readarr journey. For any inquiries or assistance during this transition, please contact our team.
Sincerely,
The Servarr TeamThe github repo has been archived.
It was weirdly focused on authors rather than individual books, anyway. Any suggestions for a replacement?
Yeah, Readarr is very awkward to use, but still sad to see going away. If the main problem is just a usable metadata server, maybe someone can save the project without much trouble.
Lidarr is similarly strange with it’s focus on artists and albums only, and apparently refusing to implement song search.
I feel like the developers of these two projects don’t actually use their own software to encounter the huge pain points, but maybe they have a use case that I don’t understand.
It’s impossible to make lidarr handle multiple releases.
It doesn’t seem like it’s good for actually amassing a collection.
The whole collection of software forces the user to limit themselves to the single version of canonical media which has been officially sanctioned by a centralized authority.
The more mainstream and corporate your media and arts interests are, the less you will notice this problem. But even with TV and movies it is a barrier once you deviate. With music and books, which due to lower production costs are literally endless in number, variations, mixes, imprints, translations, editions, covers, releases etc, it is an impossible model.
I don’t know if it’s too much inference but I sort of feel bad for the developers. This assumption about the superiority of homogeneous media and art pervades the projects in a way which suggests it is completely invisible to them. It’s very bleak.
Very true. But considering the metadata provider can manage the variations, I don’t think it’s too onerous of a consideration for the actual media management side.
I’d love a better movie manager that puts weight on extras and handles them much better. And editions, too. Directors cut, cinema cut, TV broadcast cuts. There really needs to be a better way to handle all that than a single movie file.
Though for radarr and sonarr, some of those are restrictions for the player they are accommodating. If Plex and Jellyfin don’t handle the ability to choose versions, why have the *arrs do it.
But I also understand that it’s not something the majority of users care about. So it makes it not worth their time. And as for readarr and lidarr, I don’t know if it’s just a limitation of the fork using the existing *arr framework.
Ya I mean I understand at the end of the day the devs have the prerogative to run their project as they please. And it’s smart to have a constrained set of requirements rather than trying to be all things to all people. There’s always a cost to flexibility.
I serve my TV and movies from jellyfin and it is not as prescriptive. As an imperfect workaround, the additional files can be put into a separate directory that sonarr/radarr doesn’t have access to but jellyfin does.
For books, calibre tips the balance completely in the other direction of total flexibility. It’s very powerful and with the right skills it can be made to do all kinds of tasks. But it’s hardly the smooth initial experience of the arrs.
From my experience, the most comprehensive and robust metadata harvester is the citation manager Zotero. They have spent a lot of work on building a metadata system that is both easy to use but accounts for different versions of the same work. In academic writing you need to cite the actual document you used because it could change over time, editions, etc. Instead of making their own database, they use various 3rd party collections. And of course you must be able to customize or create items for scholarly work. There is about 15 years of chat on their forums/repos of people arguing how to best identify and apply the appropriate metadata and it’s not at all smooth going even there.