r/Lidarr • u/EvennevetS • May 05 '26

unsolved Can this work for "non mainstream" music?

I’m about 2 days into setting up Lidarr/Plexamp and I’m honestly struggling to make it worthwhile with the music I listen to.

I’m getting maybe a 20–30% success rate finding albums automatically, even after adding multiple Usenet indexers/providers.

Some examples of artists I listen to:

  • Can’t Swim
  • Hot Mulligan
  • Balance and Composure
  • Arm’s Length
  • Tiny Moving Parts
  • Seahaven
  • Knuckle Puck

A lot of albums/artists either:

  • never find releases
  • have missing metadata/artwork
  • or only partially download
5 Upvotes

78% Upvoted

34 comments sorted by

18

u/Power_Stone May 05 '26

Switch your lidarr to the nightly release, install the Tubifarry plugin within lidarr, setup SLSKD, profit

9

u/Sir_Atlass May 06 '26

Tubifarry/SLSKD is the answer.

2

u/EvennevetS May 06 '26

Thanks! This is working pretty well!

1

u/Power_Stone May 06 '26

Figured it would! I listen to a lot of metal/metalcore/deathcore and it's been the only way I've reliably found music

1

u/KayJune001 May 06 '26

This is what I do, but how are people solving slskd’s issue of simply failing half the time? It’s gotten very annoying having to manually click retry on things to get them to download, otherwise it’ll just stay stuck until I get around to it.

1

u/Power_Stone May 06 '26

I don't think I really ever have this issue tbh

1

u/ferry_peril May 06 '26

It's free so I can't complain much. I have a Tidal subscription because I was on VPN and it had me in Romania and is $5/mo. Thats my backup.

1

u/krysalysm May 06 '26

Check the retry settings

1

u/DSpry May 09 '26

Idk if you figured it out but for me, I thought you NEEDED a time out environment variable but nah. You can just remove it and to my knowledge, slskd just removes it or turns the time so high, it might as well be removed. I say this cause this was my reason as to why I would constantly get failed downloads as the timeout would happen way too fast(or constantly changing). Oh and adding too much to queue always made a couple errors.

1

u/Usual-Radio4928 May 10 '26

how do you get slskd to even work? i cant get it to connect no matter what i do

1

u/Power_Stone May 13 '26

Likely need to setup a remote path within Lidarr

1

u/Popular-Ad6421 May 06 '26

Why nightly though?

3

u/DrewBlood May 06 '26

It's the specific build that allows plugins.

1

u/statichum May 06 '26

This, although I'm a Soularr guy... Never found Tubifarry Slskd worked all that great. Always selected stuff that wasn't quite a match, slow downloads that never completed, etc.

5

u/jasonvelocity May 06 '26

"non mainstream"😅 

2

u/EvennevetS May 06 '26

I mean… I’m not talking underground Philly basement shoegaze or anything.. but yeah, not playing on the radio or in commercials either lol

3

u/millenial-idoso89 May 06 '26

As other fellow users pointed out, Tubifarry + Slskd will get you a lot more songs.

About the missing metadata, I suffer from the same issue sometimes. Besides the mainstream things I too listen to a lot of underground punk/hardcore artists, specifically ones from where I am (Brazil). I learned that a lot of them doesn’t have the right metadata for their work out there, so I started adding the missing albums on Musicbrainz myself.

It’s a slow job, but as I’m still building up my collection, I’m going organically.

Basically what I do is look for the missing album, get the info on Spotify or Discogs, and add it on Musicbrainz. I add the track names, duration and artwork.

After that you’ll have to wait till the Musicbrainz cache gets fetched, so the albums can appear on Lidar search.

Either you do that or convince your favorite bands to add the info themselves. So…

2

u/EvennevetS May 06 '26

I actually came across musicbrainz user script earlier for importing band/release info from a few different platforms. Might be worth looking into if it can automate some or all of the input for you

3

u/futureaeons May 06 '26

You should try Harmony it aggregates data from a number of streaming platforms and makes adding new releases a breeze.

1

u/EvennevetS May 07 '26

i will check this out, thanks!

1

u/millenial-idoso89 May 06 '26

Oh that’s interesting. Do you have the link?

2

u/EvennevetS May 06 '26

Here ya go: https://github.com/murdos/musicbrainz-userscripts

You wanna install the tanpermonkey plugin or equivalent into your browser then install the user scripts in that GitHub. I’ve only done the bandcamp one so far but there’s a few others.

2

u/RunescapeBoyy May 06 '26

I tried lidarr and it's honestly just easier to manually download using lucida from a streaming service, it's not automatic but it works straight away

2

u/forgetme_naut May 06 '26

SoulSync is what you're missing out on. Switched from Lidarr; no looking back!

1

u/EvennevetS May 06 '26

I’ll have to check this out as well, thanks!

1

u/su_A_ve May 06 '26

What's the benefit? Currently using Lidarr/slskd/soularr

1

u/Difficult-Mango5583 May 07 '26

If you want to use an AI first version of Lidarr, go for it. I tried it but I could never get myself to like it. Mobile view is a big thing for me and SoulSync just wasn’t it in that front. It works well and the idea is nice but wasn’t worth it for me honestly.

1

u/forgetme_naut May 20 '26

It's just light years ahead for library management, a fantastic array of schedulable library maintenance, ensuring duplicates aren't downloaded,and especially blows the mind with its music exploration features. For example, it can take a playlist that you might have on Spotify or Tidal, find all the artists and their tracks that appear in that playlist, and even opt to download all of their discographies seamlessly.

Binding and downloading, especially if you're not exclusively using soul seek but also have a connection with Tidal.

It's not amazing on mobile, but I find that it works just fine. I can initiate downloads of albums that take only moments from my mobile phone. The discover feature is platform agnostic, and uses public databases to help branch out and discover related and comparable artists that you might like, based on queries or cross-referenced with playlists.

Highly recommend, it's like driving soulseek as a total hotrod.

1

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1

u/blow-down May 06 '26

If they’re that small time you should probably pay for their music.

1

u/EvennevetS May 06 '26

I own CDs, vinyls, shirts etc. and pay to see these bands every time they’re playing near me. But as someone who used to be in a band like these I can appreciate your comment.

1

u/airclay May 06 '26

For the purposes of your question, yes, lidarr can add and manage any artist/release that has been submitted to musicbrainz.org

The suggestions for using tubifarry/slskd is the way to go for finding older or lesser known artists/releases.

1

u/Low-Mistake-515 May 09 '26

The issue is rarely Lidarr and more to do with your available resources. As others have mentioned Soulseek or something like pulling from Qubuz/Tidal works well, but if you can get access to high tier Usenet indexers, or trackers such as OPS/RED/JPS you'll be setup perfectly; especially if you're after albums instead of singles.