I noticed that my Ansible playbook failed to do a docker pull on readarr, I just commented it and was going to investigate further today. This sucks, especially because rreading-glasses did in fact completely solve the issue they're facing. Not sure why they didn't consider migrating to it officially, it's only a config change.
this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2025
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Readerr have been removed everywhere on rreading-glasses readme, maybe there is something related to law issues ? Also I didn't understand what is rreading-glasses and why you need it
Yeah, it's probably a legal thing, rreading-glasses is just metadata for books, completely legal, but readarr legality is less clear, so maybe they're trying to prevent issues.
Also I didn't understand what is rreading-glasses and why you need it
Say you want to grab a book by Isaac Asimov, you type the name of the book in readarr search bar, readarr contacts a metadata provider to show you cover images, author, date, etc. Then when you select the book readarr uses that metadata to search for downloads and ensure you're getting the correct book and not another random book with the same name.
The problem is that readarr uses a closed source API for it's metadata, and it's constantly offline, which makes it impossible to use readarr. Luckily they allow you to customize the URL for the API, and rreading-glasses is an open source implementation of that API that you can use as a drop in replacement.
I'm hoping someone will have some info about what happened because it seems strange. What does this mean?
Unlike R——'s proprietary service, this is much faster, handles large authors, has full coverage of G——R—— (or Hardcover!)
I believe R-- stands for Readarr and G--R-- stands for GoodReads.
Because one of the main issues is they also don’t have anyone maintaining the project. There’s no one to make the config change.
Fixed Lidarr: https://github.com/blampe/hearring-aid
And Radarr: https://github.com/blampe/rreading-glasses
Basically they replace the broken closed source metadata server for both with a working one.
The author is also in talks with Readarr to take over the project.
Wait, Lidarr also has broken metadata search?
Yea, it's been broken for weeks. You can't search for new artists at all.
It got sorta fixed a while ago and now I can search for artists, but adding them doesn't work. Their metadata server crapped out months ago and they've been fixing it ever since, should be done soonish. Or not.
It didn’t get sorta fixed, the few results that currently show up are just cached results from Cloudflare. The metadata server also didn’t crap out; MusicBrainz made breaking changes to their API.
From the latest updates in the Discord, most of the rebuild work is done. The devs now just need to find the time to get it spun up and working for users - I think one of them is currently in the middle of a move if I read correctly, so it’s just a matter of patience right now.
The metadata proxy that mirrors musicbrainz DB is broken (read: Imploded).
For now artist/album search is broken.
Dunno about metadata-tagging for existing entries
Yeah this sucks but honestly it never really worked well for me, ebooks are horribly underserved in the media world.
Having to run two instances to support audio and text books was the deal breaker for me.
Now I use audiobookshelf, and it's easy enough to find everything I need on mam without an extra search layer.
https://github.com/advplyr/audiobookshelf
Is this what you are talking about? How dues this work for funding audio books? That's my biggest problem
Yeah, it does a good enough job of handling the metadata which is why I mentioned it. To find books you need a private tracker.
yes that is correct. it is a server/client solution so you can track you progress.
zero finding ability. try Lazy Librarian.
remember that audiobooks are relatively rare due to their high production costs. so a lot of books do not have an audio version. Could consider text to speech.
there are some massive torrents that have like thousands of audiobooks in them and you have to go and select which ones to download. I'm not sure how I stumbled on these in the past so if you figure that out let me know.
I'm actually using Audiobookshelf as my main server. I just wanted Readarr to get metadata and organize the folders. Do you have any workflow tips for that?
The best way I found to do this was using audiobookshelfs upload feature and grabbing the meta data before upload. This sorts the folders for you
It's sort of weird to upload because it's already on the hard drive where I want it to go.. Just has to get squeezed back and forth through the pipes of my LAN a few times to go through this process.
No, it's a hot mess. I only get 6 books a month and she is one and done so it's manageable to do it manually
But how do you get the audiobooks if you don't use Readarr?
Readarr is just a tool that facilitates downloading via bittorrent or usenet. You can just use those the old fashioned way without it.
Edit: The program Lazy Librarian that some people are mentioning also assists with the searching and downloading, if you prefer not to do it by hand.
You can purchase audiobooks too, especially from authors who make them available on DRM-free platforms.
And there's always https://librivox.org/
mam?
Just a source. Not a metadata provider.
And trying to find metadata for books is like searching for a music cd from propular artists.
Example: https://musicbrainz.org/release-group/afca53c1-c5b3-3f91-8590-281b0aa12722
They are a beast in itself.
Multiple releases/revisions spread across languages and/or countries.
The media world huh?
You know exactly what I'm referring to
You damn right know exactly what I'm referring to.
They're kind of small enough that if I want a PDF, I can just google it and download it from some random foreign university who are hosting it for some reason. You'd likely struggle to find more obscure stuff that way though.
I'm generally pretty happy with LazyLibrarian. I know people get really excited about the *arr stack, but Readarr never worked well for ebooks. It was maybe a little better at finding audiobooks, but LL is getting better at that.
Yeah same
I used LL years ago before I got into any of the arrs. I was planning to return to it but ran into some sort of install/dependency issues. Maybe I'll give it another whirl in case they've solved spontaneously.
Any alternative apart from lazylibrarian ?
Not anything that I have found, but at least LL is pretty solid. It may actually help development if LL gets some more focus from the community; It sort of got overshadowed by Readarr, simply because people wanted to stay within the *arr ecosystem.
Not right now
Where are the vibe coders when you need them ;)
Hopefully, slowly but surely destroying a number of for profit businesses.
Audiobookshelf and LL are it. Or calibre automation but it sucks.
Not that I'm happy about this or anything, I think competition is good.
But I never got readarr to work properly, it seemed to have a workflow that was unintuitive to me, compared to Radarr and Sonarr.
Problem was the underlying metadata which was either outdated or incorrect
I was just getting this set up, this and the music one, because I want to leave Spotify. Hopefully an alternative solution shows up.
Same here.
Did you find a good way to export the Spotify playlist and get that torrented somehow?
Lidarr does an alright job of it.
Zotify and similar tools (not those youtube downloaders!)
I can't offer any specific advice but there seem to be a great many projects going to fill this need:
https://alternativeto.net/software/spotify/?license=opensource&platform=self-hosted
How would this have compared to Calibre's OPDS function? I've used that for years with no issues.
Not related. Readarr was more like lazylib
That's why that docker pull couldn't find it earlier