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?

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[–] theangriestbird@beehaw.org 7 points 2 days ago

Radarr is for movies, Sonarr is for TV. You tell Sonarr which TV shows you want in your library, and then Sonarr automatically searches the torrent sites or usenet sites that you specified in your settings to find the episodes. There are a whole bunch of settings you can tweak to tell Sonarr what you consider to be a "good" file, so when Sonarr automatically searches, it finds the best version available for each episode. When it finds those good files, it automatically passes them to your torrent client (like qBittorrent) for download. When the files finish downloading, Sonarr automatically creates a copy of the file and renames the copy in a way that makes it super easy for Jellyfin to find the metadata. When it creates this copy, it uses a special kind of copying called "hardlinking" which makes it look like two copies, but only take up the space of one file. This has the advantage of having one folder for raw downloads and another for your actual media library, so you can easily keep seeding files while also having a version of the files you can rename for metadata purposes.

Even if you don't use Radarr/Sonarr for downloading, they are still pretty useful for media management.