For music I would definitely agree with you. RIP What.CD
AnimeTosho covers the majority if not all my anime needs. Makes it easy for people to just add stuff to plex watchlist, and it gets automatically downloaded with the preferred quality and language settings.
I still have a (very) old Baka account. That site is a godsend. Nyaa comes in clutch at times, I won’t deny that.
Movies and TV shows, tho? Usenet. Specially western stuff.
And you know what? I do tend to agree with your view. It’s just that I’ve reached a point where I can’t be bothered with private trackers and some of the weird rules some of them have. Specially now that I migrated away from a seed box to an in-house (literally) server.
The convenience is top notch tho!
In that case, do the exact same thing and ignore Usenet.
You can still automate everything and do everything I said with torrents!!
Btw, there are excellent Usenet discounts. I currently pay approx… 50ish dollars a year for both providers and indexers? But I understand it may not be feasible. Just sharing the options.
You can definitely still integrate the whole stack with both public and private trackers
May I a recommend a change in approach?
Ditch the torrents for Usenet. Faster downloads, fully encrypted, none of the risks of torrents.
I used to torrent the old fashioned way (and still do for some obscure stuff), but I switched over to usenet.
The arr stack fully supports usenet natively.
You can check out https://trash-guides.info/ for a massive amount of information.
The TLDR is:
get a usenet subscription. I use easy news, viper news and one more I cannot recall. Easy news unlimited, the other two are “block” accounts from an entirely separate usenet provider to “fill in the blanks” if any files are missing from my main provider.
sign up for several indexers. DrunkenSlug is my favorite. I am subbed to a few more as well. The more you have the more you’ll have access to.
set up your arr stack. Use Prowlarr to configure your indexers, which will propagate them to Radarr, Sonarr, and Lidarr.
set up your download client with your provider configuration. I used SABnzb
fine tune your Sonarr and Radarr. Try to prioritize releases/codecs/encodes/remuxes based on your needs. I just try to grab h265/x265 or HEVC to reduce storage consumption as much as possible. You can even specify if you want 5.1 audio, Dolby Atmos, HDR, etc. it’s all there in trash guides.
set up your Jellyfin. There is where I cannot help because I use Plex. I did set it up and it scanned my library quite well but it’s just not there yet for normal users (friends and family)
This is just a very high level overview. Feel free to ask tho I am not a Usenet/Arr guru by any means but my setup works.
Edit: you can still incorporate torrents into your workflow but you really don’t need to. In the off chance you can’t find something on Usenet and you find a torrent, just download it normally and throw it in your library. Jellyfin will pick it up and pull the relevant metadata for you. I do the same thing using YT-DLP for videos.
Did you try yt-dlp? It might work.
This will have a rather steep learning curve but it’s honestly great.
ytdl-sub
It’s based off of yt-dlp with express intention of automating downloads and metadata for whichever media server you use.
It’s very customizable and works extremely well once setup correctly. Oh and it integrates with SponsorBlock!
As much as I hate using discord for FOSS projects and technical support, their discord was actually quite helpful in getting me up to speed.