Exactly the title. I’m researching having a jellyfin server and downloading media seems like it would be tedious (the way I’ve done it once or twice previously). I could use some clarity on what Sonarr is, what it looks like (like is there a GUI?? I’m too stupid to run something off of a terminal), and how it works. I’m familiar with torrenting but not with usenet, and I use the megathread from this community. Can someone explain Sonarr/Radarr to me in a way that would be understandable to someone at my level of understanding?
Others have explained it well. Just want to add a recommendation to use the trash guides (https://trash-guides.info/) to configure these apps. You can use Notifiarr to sync these changes automatically too
Radarr (Movies) / Sonarr (Shows/Series) - You search for a movie/show, you hit the “I want that” button, it does the searching through Torrents or Usenet, once it find a match it send a signal to your download client to begin downloading, once done Radarr/Sonarr will take that file and neatly manage it for your media viewer (Jellyfin) essentially automating the entire process.
There is quite a bit of configuration needed for things start to flow smoothly but relatively straight forward.
If you aren’t already self-hosting services and aren’t really comfortable with command line, you might want to look at something like CasaOS and this video: https://youtu.be/QfpZcXXGpVA
I watched it several times when building my stack and still go back to it from time to time.
Ultimately, Sonarr and Radarr take away the tedium of running your media server. You tell it what you want, it does the work of finding, obtaining, naming, and sorting. Then Jellyfin picks it up automatically. Jellyseerr, as others have said, puts a nice shiny coat of paint on it.
I’ll just add, have a look at overseerr as well. It has has the same interface style for searching TV/Movies in a single interface, it then pushes the requests out to the correct *arr stack be that sonarr or radarr
I like the recommended page in overseerr much more tha what is in the other *arr apps
Overseerr doesn’t seem to be developed much anymore. Technically, these are for request management and for general search you would use prowlarr. In reality, if you don’t want to play administrator for other users using Sonarr or radarr directly is easier and more reliable. You can tell that the whole stack was created by random disjointed developers and not a main UX designer because everything about it is very obtuse.
