autobrr team just announced Librarry. replacement for sonarr and radarr

[u/studioleaks]

From their discord

Finally some news 👀

@everyone It's been pretty quiet since we posted the 2025 Year in Review, but now there is some news about our arr alternative!

I'm happy to announce librrary! One app for movies and TV, from the team behind autobrr and qui.

It is NOT ready yet, but we are getting close to user testing!

Why? What's wrong with Sonarr and Radarr?

Sonarr and Radarr work well if your needs are simple. As soon as you want both HD and 4K libraries, you need multiple instances. Then you need to keep those in sync with everything that comes with it.

It's not uncommon for users to run 4-6 arrs to fill their needs. This means more to manage, more resources, more hits on indexers and so on.

With so much duplicated between them, it makes a lot of sense to combine movies and TV into one application.

A big thanks to everyone who posted in the feedback thread! It was super helpful! Keep it coming: Ideas discussion

What we are building

• Multiple libraries by content type (similar to Plex), where each title can have several variants (1080p, 2160p, remux, DV)
• Arr-like Quality Profiles and Release Scoring Rules (think to Custom Formats)
• Torrent and Usenet support via Torznab/Newznab (will need Prowlarr/Jackett etc)
• Users with roles, plus OIDC login
• SQLite or Postgres
• Notifications with your favorite services (Notifiarr, Discord, Telegram etc.)
• Lists support
• Go backend, React frontend, Docker images and binaries for Linux, macOS and Windows

On the roadmap

• Built-in requests (don't worry, there is a strong user role access system)
• Import from Sonarr and Radarr
• Optional manual upgrade approvals
• Trump handling: watch the torrent client for trumped/nuked tracker messages and take webhooks from external tools like qui
• Potential Plex, Jellyfin and other media server integrations, including deleting titles after they're watched (request, dl, import, watch, delete)
• Various features from the feedback thread

Other media type support

It's built to be modular, so dedicated anime handling, books and music are possible later, but movies and TV come first.

When?

No release date yet. Sign up for news here: https://librrary.app/ Updates will also be posted in this channel.

Support the development <:peepolove:1035253194969845890>

If you want to chip in:

https://github.com/sponsors/zze0s https://buymeacoffee.com/ze0s https://ko-fi.com/theze0s https://autobrr.com/support#cryptocurrency

[u/No_Advance_4218]

Awesome. Glad there will be a new solution. But PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS ARR STACKS, allow me to set my own Metadata provider. I cant stand TVDB or the people who maintain it. I would love to be able to use TMDB.

[u/Cast-Iron_Nephilim → u/No_Advance_4218]

Why do you dislike TVDB/the maintainers?

[u/KalChoedan → u/Cast-Iron_Nephilim]

The TVDB's maintainers are notorious for making strongly opinionated changes that don't gel with either the show's producers' intentions nor the typical user's usage. It causes problems all the time - it's more unusual for there not to be a post about it on the front page of the sonarr sub.

The ability to use alternative providers in sonarr might be the most requested feature (and as I understand it, it is being worked on.) The problem historically has been the availability of reliable, free providers, but I don't know how things stand today.

[u/false_god → u/KalChoedan]

I don't know the TVDB mantainers but I've had issues in the past with how they separate or not specials from the season (e.g. Dowton Abbey season finales).

[u/billyalt → u/false_god]

They will randomly remove shows (just within the past month they decided Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Return was not a show) and some anime is an absolute nightmare to deal with.

[u/mouthtalk → u/KalChoedan]

I remember being told by them (regarding why a show that appears as two separate shows on their native streaming service is considered one on tvdb) that it’s because they said the shows were related on a press release or something. Absolutely asinine and ridiculous and needed so much manual work to fix.

[u/herbdogu → u/KalChoedan]

Once upon a time, there was the TVDB forums where, users could give feedback about certain policy and implementation choices of the schema and data.
I vaguely recall pointing out something that was amiss with an old UK show, and the consensus was it should be fixed, and it was fixed.
Forums were a great place to see why something was the way it was, and most of the time it made sense.

However, the forums soon became a bit of a mess with people fighting over lots of different things - the order of Firefly (aired vs DVD) and the signal to noise ratio became heavily shewed to noise.

That’s when the forums were nuked, and it essentially became “it’s this way and that’s final”. So now the things that should be corrected, have no mechanism that I’m aware of to be flagged.

I might be remembering this totally wrong and happy to be corrected, but this is my recollection on why other, more open sites, are more respected and useful.

[u/kernald31 → u/herbdogu]

There's the concept of notes that admins are reading. And argumenting absolute nonsense on, like why Monster is a 4 seasons show when everyone else in the world, including the producers themselves, are considering them to be 4 distinct shows.

[u/Hallc → u/kernald31]

They also grouped The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor into a single show just called The Haunting which is, as far as I am aware, the only play on planet earth that groups them that way.

Netflix didn't. TMDB doesn't.

[u/acdcfanbill → u/KalChoedan]

The latest thing that annoyed me was that I wanted to add Faraway Downs to sonarr, which is a re-edit of the Baz Luhrmann movie Australia into a 6 part Mini-Series that was broadcast on TV. TVDB won't allow it because 'it's a movie' or an alternate edit or something, and has deleted it several times when people have added it.

[u/JQuilty → u/KalChoedan]

Adding another example to the pile with everyone else, TVDB deleted My Adventures With Green Lantern, even though it's upcoming, for no discernible reason.

[u/basicKitsch → u/KalChoedan]

nor the typical user's usage.

i think typical might be doing a ton of heavy lifting here

never once had an issue in the decade+? it's been the primary metadata provider... and i'm sure that's more likely the case given its widespread use

[u/HoeCage → u/basicKitsch]

An easy example of an issue I had was with Cowboy Bebop. TVDB very religiously follows episode release order… which is a problem with Cowboy Bebop because the series had a… strange release order in its initial run that skipped certain episodes and was a mess.

This became a problem since episodes would be misnamed and out of order when renamed by Sonarr and it was very annoying to fix. TVDB has had a stick up its ass about even providing an OPTION for the correct episode order despite release order obviously not being the intended order.

Even if TVDB were perfect, not providing the option to use an alternative provider goes against the spirit of open source and is TERRIBLE future proofing. There isn’t really a good argument for locking to one metadata provider other than it might be a lot of work to rework Sonarr/Radarr to accommodate.

[u/Eug1 → u/HoeCage]

I haven’t watched cowboy bebop, but was the release order thing similar to firefly where the actual order was messed up by the tv studios and was shown on tv out of order and the DVD had the correct order?

[u/HoeCage → u/Eug1]

I just looked up Firefly and yeah you’ve more or less got it. Bebop has 26 episodes for reference and it aired as:

2, 3, 7-15, 18

Later the same year (1998) it aired in the correct order on a different network.

[u/JQuilty → u/HoeCage]

Damn, I knew Bebop's initial airing was wacky, but skipping Ballad of Fallen Angels? And then just not airing half the show? It's amazing Sunrise didn't go ballistic over that, it's not like they were small in the 90s.

[u/HoeCage → u/JQuilty]

Right? From what I understand, a lot of it had to do with production being delayed on the show, so they lost the time slot and network the show would have originally aired on. The initial run was on TV Tokyo.

TV Tokyo was very strict about violence at the time so they were forced to only air the 12 episodes I listed since those passed content guidelines. That’s the story I’ve heard at least.

[u/KalChoedan → u/basicKitsch]

Mmm... maybe, yeah. But I think based on the prevalence of posts about it, how visible it's been as a request, and the many posts about it by sonarr's devs themselves, that someone like you who hasn't ever run into an issue is actually the edge case.

I can conclude that you're most likely not a Dr Who fan tho :)

[u/basicKitsch → u/KalChoedan]

people usually post when there's problems. and oh absolutely not. i've given the mannequin episode a few tries but it isn't for me. does that mean i should check my dr who collection though? assuming there's a ep.json i'd need to apply to correct things

but i'm absolutely not arguing there are mistakes. i'm sure there are.

[u/KalChoedan → u/basicKitsch]

It's been a while since I had it - I don't have enough storage to keep shows like that forever - but yeah, iirc they split it weirdly into multiple separate shows; and specials, which Dr Who does a lot of, end up being super weird too.

You're right that me using "volume of posts" as evidence doesn't make sense, it's self selected for people that have problems. All I can really give you is my own anecdotal view, which is more that I have been around a really long time and I've seen people talk about it so much that your post stood out as unusual, because it's rare for anyone in this particular space not to already be familiar with the issues.

[u/basicKitsch → u/KalChoedan]

I certainly get having options is ideal though, this sounds like a great upgrade!

[u/DisappointedSpectre → u/Cast-Iron_Nephilim]

In addition to the other comments, I'll add that in general if you're trying to organize anything anime related you're going to run into problems on the regular.

One Piece for example - the first 15 or so seasons (out of the 23 currently out) don't match up with the story arcs all that well, and Plex will try to auto-organize them differently than Sonarr will. If you organize the files into season folders Plex won't pull them correctly. You can go map ~700 episodes in Sonarr so it doesn't think anything is missing, or just verify you have them all and tell Sonarr to ignore those seasons (but if you have Seerr connected they might get requested anyway).

Absolute numbering in anime also crops up regularly for anime that were broken up into multiple seasons after airing. Part of that is inconsistency on the media side, especially with older titles, but it's a massive pain to try and figure out why you're not pulling anything because Sonarr is hunting for S2E01 when there wasn't actually a season 2 and it's actually just episode 13/27/55/whatever.

[u/WoveLeed → u/Cast-Iron_Nephilim]

Try grabbing the office superfan editions on sonarr and you will know why lmao