With Readarr calling it quits, I’m looking for an alternative. More interested in audiobook functionality than ebook. I tried LazyLibrarian, and absolutely hated it.
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LazyLibrarian is fantastic for ebooks. Basically useless for audiobooks. I’ve found the entire *arr stack seems ill suited for audiobooks.
Oh, LazyLibrarian. I guess no one else could figure out how it works. I still try after updates… Nope. If it works, I just don’t understand it.
https://github.com/advplyr/audiobookshelf
I manually grab what I want from mam
Audiobook shelf is great, and they have several good client apps in addition to the browser app.
Never had any success with any of the book stuff.
There’s seemingly no established ripping scene for books. They don’t follow a system.
The only reason why sonarr and radar work so well is because the scene is so neatly organised with schedules, structure etc
Ive not looked into it so I don’t know what kind of challenges they face. Theoretically, I don’t see where the problem is though…
The primary input is a users “wishlist” of things they want. Each thing is then compared against a master list which confirms it exists and when it should be available (metadata). This is optional, but offers a more rich experience. Lastly, each thing is queried against a torrent index to try and find it. Its a relatively simple procedure. I guess the only question is whether books appear on these indices or not.
After a quick glance at the notice on their site, it seems metadata was the problem… or more precisely, no work was being done to move to a new provider. It kinda reads like they lost steam and stopped developing it.
There isn’t really an agreed-on metadata system for ebooks, which is surprising to me, considering the ISBN system is well-established as a credible source.
Uploading ebooks to my CWA instance is a guaranteed metadata edit on each one.
I’ll never understand why i can edit metadata on calibre, close out, upload it to calibre-web and it’s a crap shoot on what, if any, metadata populates.
Good point tbh. All the work is done lol
Chaptarr is looking like it will be the choice, still really early though. Readarr + reading-glasses should work well enough for you in the meantime until chaptarr is in a better spot in development for regular use.
Apparently the folks from the rreading-glasses repo accuse Chaptarr of being vibe coded, can find it directly in their README.
For the unaware rreading-glasses is a rebuilt metadata server for Readarr, also happens to be endorsed by Readarr/Servarr, just switch it out and you’re good to go. However, Readarr won’t receive anymore feature updates or bug fixes it seems.
It’s a real shame because Readarr did work and they really just needed to fix their own metadata servers. No? Or were there other problems I’m not aware of?
It never worked well for me. Not because it couldn’t fetch ebooks, but because it defaults to adding an author’s entire library, which was dumb for my reading habits.
I would search for a book, find it, only be able to add the author, and then have to uncheck almost all the books the author had written because I just wanted one.
Sorting by “books” just showed me a list of hundreds of books when I just wanted 7 of those.
If your workflow matched that for readarr, I’m sure it worked well, metadata problems aside.
Huh. I am sure you could search for individual books. For sure you could do it by goodreads ID I think? Yes, adding an entire author as the primary way to do things is a bit much for some. I know for sure I have managed to do individual books before now.
They don’t have enough maintainers left.
Yeah, I still use the latest readarr builds with both ebooks and audiobook, and with rreading-glasses they still work. I am also in the chaptarr discord and got access to the alpha build, which looks really promising. Still rough around the edges, though.
This is how I learn readarr is done :( I was just thinking of setting it up again one of these days but was having some issues with lidarr that got in the way
If the issue was just metadata parsing, surely the rest of the software can be saved and forked, no? No need to create everything from scratch?
They would be willing to reopen it if people show up to develop it. The problem is that seemingly noone is invested enough to keep it going.
Discord 😬
Edit:
DuckDuckGo’s AI says this, which sounds interesting if true, though it doesn’t provide a source to confirm:
Chaptarr is an upcoming project that is a heavily revamped fork of Readarr, currently in closed Alpha phase, and aims to improve interoperability with Readarr. You can find more information and updates on its development on GitHub
