Sailing Arr seas and the Usenet oceans

One month ago I decided to give the 'Arrs a chance and, while there are issues and limits, i'am loving them.

But I have an issue: at home I have only internet access trough a 5G mobile network connection which means zero opportunity to have port forwarding or open ports at all. This rules out private torrent trackers (tried a couple, no luck in getting any ratio ofc). Public torrent trackers being basically shit, I decided to give Usenet a try, and two things happened:

I started loving it!
I discovered I have a 1tb/months full band with cap on my home connection. After that from 200mb/s I get dropped to 6mb/s this time, unlimited bandwidth.

I have a few suggestions first for newcomers: 'Arrs: start using them NOW. Also, they will help you organize your existing library, but be aware that doing a good job is not only mandatory but also time-consuming. Also, get JellyFin and it will play along with your organized (-- imean it) collection nicely. Make sure you set proper umask and group (media management/advanced settings for each arr app) do that the entire stack andbl jellyfin can write into your media collection: this will reduce issues with metadata sync a lot. Get bazarr working with subscene! And setup a nice nginx reverse proxy for the entire stack.

Some issues I ran into: Readarr really has issues with finding stuff and specially with audio books. Anybody could help me out here?

Lidarr seems always to go to torrent, which get stuck with no seeders for me. Is there music on Usenet?

Now to the last part: Usenet! That changed my entire game. As movies and TV series, I can literally find anything fast and saturated my 1tb plan in two days. I have newshosting and recently got eweka for less than 4€/month. Don't get caught in the common lie of three months free: they always charge 15 month immediately so you cannot really test them out then cancel. As indexers I got NZBGeek and I am planning to seek out DrunkenSlug. Any suggestions here?

(I know newshosting and eweka are probably overlapping, getting both was a mistake, but a relatively cheap one)

One last question: audiobooks and music on Usenet: what is your experience?

One truly last question: any way to integrate soulseek (nicotine+) on the arr stack?

Thanks fellow sailors.

30 comments

For Lidarr I use Lidarr on Steroids (there is also Lidarr extended and a plug in script but I couldn't get those going). Probably on me because I can't get nginx going either.

I connected Deemix to it (you need a Deezer account) you can get MP3 for free, and with premium Deezer you can get lossless. All the music you want there.

There is also Soulseek for rare stuff but it's manual and I cant find a way to connect it to Lidarr.

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The main issue with Usenet is retention. I don't mean that you should worry too much about retention on your particular providers, but just as a general concept the idea that after 10-15 years files go away means that it can be tough to find older media, especially media that is not popular enough for people to reupload.

People always talk about needing multiple servers but I just use Astraweb and I have been fine. I have a block plan on another server somewhere but I honestly didn't even set it up when I reconfigured nzbget.

Movies and TV shows have been super easy to find on Usenet, but even with a couple private indexers I have found music and books to be hit or miss. I use Tidal with Plex and the $10 per month has been worth it to me simply because I listen to a ton of different music. That said, probably 80% of what I listen to has been available on Usenet.

I read a lot of nerdy books (fantasy and sci-fi) and that's been easy enough to find, but my wife's more mainstream tastes have actually been trickier.

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What Usenet provider/s did you end up using?

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- Newshosting and eweka atm, unless any better recommendation?
  
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  What is the difference in results by only having one?
  
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- I'm a big fan of frugal, they also give you a block account with another backbone that helps when some parts were DMCAed. Giganews has always been the fastest, but recently got sold so not sure if they are still top dog.
  
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5G mobile network connection which means zero opportunity to have port forwarding or open ports at all. This rules out private torrent trackers (tried a couple, no luck in getting any ratio ofc).

So is this why nobody leeches from me in private tracker downloaded torrents? I use a 4G mobile sim on a router that support sim cards.

I mostly download freeleach series' from torrentleach but need a way to get away from hit and runs

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- You're on private trackers and you don't understand port forwarding?
  
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  Yeah i just got to Torrentleech when they did open signups. I thought port forwarding is just a VPN thing because people only mentioned it when talking about their vpn problems
  
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  What do you mean?
  
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- Over 4g or 5g there is no way to use private trackers you will always be a hit and run.
  
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- Get a VPN with port forward or create your own with tunnels if you have access to a public, static, ip address somehow.
  
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  Damn. No money for that. Would i be able to do this with windscribe free plan (10GB)? That should be enough because I don't have to 1:1 just seeding for 10 days is enough
  
  Edit- you know what? There's actually a port forward option in my router's firewall section, even though it is a 4G router. It was disabled. I'll enable it and let's see if it works
  
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Unfortunatly I have the same experience as you regarding Readarr and audiobooks. I think one of the bigger issues is that audiobooks aren’t indexed a lot on usenet. Both indexera I use get close to no matches when I’m searching for even slightly more niche books (I find epubs all right, but no audiobooks). To solve the issue of finding stuff you would probably need a myanonymouse (private torrent tracker) invite or something, which has focus on audiobooks.

I also find that it syncs my library incorrectly to books (book A as book B, book B also as book B), which then are almost impossible to sort out, and even when it does find books that are monitored I need to manually import them nine times out of ten.

My somewhat best experience was to just DL audiobooks normally and dump them in a ”black hole” directory, and let readarr import them like that.

However, the other issues got to me and I jumped ship.

Hopefully it will become a more mature product in the future, but for now I’m staying to manual handling.

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As someone who lived with awful 4G internet for 8 years, I strongly recommend getting a Blu Ray drive, MakeMKV, and A Library Card.

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- Sorry i live in Italy and I am pretty sure my local library has no digital media to lend :)
  
  But Usenet is perfect for my use case. I get to 200mb/s, for real, for 1tb/month which is pretty good.
  
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Any chance you could explain the nginx reverse proxy?

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- Look into Caddy instead if you just need something simple for outside access. All you need is a DynDNS service (duckdns is easy), a few lines worth of Caddy config to point that address to your internal ports, port forwarding 80 & 443 to the machine running Caddy, and you're good to go. If you follow the documentation, you'll be running in 10 minutes.
  
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  This will not work unless you can actually have a public IP and forward ports.
  
  In my case I rent a vps (for the public IP) and setup an ssh tunnel to itn (for secure port forwarding) with socat to my internal nginx. Will write a specific post later on about all this.
  
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- I did check my newer posts
  
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  Much appreciated, looks like a great guide!
  
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- I will try to make a specific post one of these days....
  
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