cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/47871600
(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The Servarr TeamThe github repo has been archived.
LazyLibrarian seems to be the most viable alternative. It has always been overshadowed by Readarr, mostly because everyone wanted to stay within the *arr stack. But maybe with Readarr shutting down, we’ll get some more community support for LL.
I would love to see a replacement that supports Anna’s Archive.
It was weirdly focused on authors rather than individual books, anyway. Any suggestions for a replacement?
Yeah, Readarr is very awkward to use, but still sad to see going away. If the main problem is just a usable metadata server, maybe someone can save the project without much trouble.
Lidarr is similarly strange with it’s focus on artists and albums only, and apparently refusing to implement song search.
I feel like the developers of these two projects don’t actually use their own software to encounter the huge pain points, but maybe they have a use case that I don’t understand.
It’s impossible to make lidarr handle multiple releases.
It doesn’t seem like it’s good for actually amassing a collection.
The whole collection of software forces the user to limit themselves to the single version of canonical media which has been officially sanctioned by a centralized authority.
The more mainstream and corporate your media and arts interests are, the less you will notice this problem. But even with TV and movies it is a barrier once you deviate. With music and books, which due to lower production costs are literally endless in number, variations, mixes, imprints, translations, editions, covers, releases etc, it is an impossible model.
I don’t know if it’s too much inference but I sort of feel bad for the developers. This assumption about the superiority of homogeneous media and art pervades the projects in a way which suggests it is completely invisible to them. It’s very bleak.
