(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 Team

The github repo has been archived.

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[–] laserjet@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 day ago

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.