One month ago I decided to give the 'Arrs a chance and, while there are issues and limits, i'am loving them.
But I have an issue: at home I have only internet access trough a 5G mobile network connection which means zero opportunity to have port forwarding or open ports at all. This rules out private torrent trackers (tried a couple, no luck in getting any ratio ofc). Public torrent trackers being basically shit, I decided to give Usenet a try, and two things happened:
- I started loving it!
- I discovered I have a 1tb/months full band with cap on my home connection. After that from 200mb/s I get dropped to 6mb/s this time, unlimited bandwidth.
I have a few suggestions first for newcomers: 'Arrs: start using them NOW. Also, they will help you organize your existing library, but be aware that doing a good job is not only mandatory but also time-consuming. Also, get JellyFin and it will play along with your organized (-- imean it) collection nicely. Make sure you set proper umask and group (media management/advanced settings for each arr app) do that the entire stack andbl jellyfin can write into your media collection: this will reduce issues with metadata sync a lot. Get bazarr working with subscene! And setup a nice nginx reverse proxy for the entire stack.
Some issues I ran into: Readarr really has issues with finding stuff and specially with audio books. Anybody could help me out here?
Lidarr seems always to go to torrent, which get stuck with no seeders for me. Is there music on Usenet?
Now to the last part: Usenet! That changed my entire game. As movies and TV series, I can literally find anything fast and saturated my 1tb plan in two days. I have newshosting and recently got eweka for less than 4€/month. Don't get caught in the common lie of three months free: they always charge 15 month immediately so you cannot really test them out then cancel. As indexers I got NZBGeek and I am planning to seek out DrunkenSlug. Any suggestions here?
(I know newshosting and eweka are probably overlapping, getting both was a mistake, but a relatively cheap one)
One last question: audiobooks and music on Usenet: what is your experience?
One truly last question: any way to integrate soulseek (nicotine+) on the arr stack?
Thanks fellow sailors.
The main issue with Usenet is retention. I don't mean that you should worry too much about retention on your particular providers, but just as a general concept the idea that after 10-15 years files go away means that it can be tough to find older media, especially media that is not popular enough for people to reupload.
People always talk about needing multiple servers but I just use Astraweb and I have been fine. I have a block plan on another server somewhere but I honestly didn't even set it up when I reconfigured nzbget.
Movies and TV shows have been super easy to find on Usenet, but even with a couple private indexers I have found music and books to be hit or miss. I use Tidal with Plex and the $10 per month has been worth it to me simply because I listen to a ton of different music. That said, probably 80% of what I listen to has been available on Usenet.
I read a lot of nerdy books (fantasy and sci-fi) and that's been easy enough to find, but my wife's more mainstream tastes have actually been trickier.