Claude and I went through the Tubifarry source to figure out why some Soulseek searches send a dozen queries and others send one. None of this is in the README or the setting help text, so I'm sharing it in case it's useful. This is based on the source as of early October 2026 and may change in later releases. It's unofficial, so for support, use the Tubifarry repo.

The short version

Tubifarry doesn't send one query per album search. It builds an ordered list of query strategies and runs them one at a time, stopping as soon as one returns enough results.

How the chain runs

1. It classifies the album. It checks for Various Artists releases, self-titled albums, very short album titles, EPs and singles that need the release type added, volume numbers, Roman numerals, and accented characters or punctuation.
2. It orders the strategies in four groups: Special, Base, Variation, then Fallback. Strategies that are turned off or don't apply to this album are skipped.
3. Each strategy is its own tier. Tiers run in order, and a tier's query isn't built until that tier runs.
4. It stops at the first tier with usable results. With Minimum Results set to 0, one result is enough. Otherwise, the tier needs at least that many results. The count is per tier, not a running total. Results from earlier tiers are still kept.
5. It never sends the same query twice.

The strategies, in order

Blocked search terms

The Soulseek server filters certain search phrases. Tubifarry has its own hardcoded list of about 30 terms, mostly big artist names and a few album and song titles. You can't edit the list from Lidarr.

When a query contains one of these terms, Tubifarry first tries adding an accent to get past the filter, for example Beyonce becomes Bèyonce. If that isn't possible, it drops the word. As a last resort, it removes the blocked words and searches with a track title from the album instead.

Related: slskd receives the server's real list of excluded phrases but doesn't expose it through its API. You can see it by turning on debug logging in slskd and searching the log for Excluded search phrases.

Things that may catch you out

• Track Fallback works on its own. The help text says it needs Enable Fallback Search, but in the current code it runs whenever Track Fallback is on.
• Track Fallback tries only one track, the one with the longest title.
• A high Minimum Results means many queries. Each tier has to reach the number on its own, so a high value can run most of the chain for every album. On Soulseek, that can slow you down or get you rate-limited.
• Edition Stripped and Blocked Term Evidence have no setting. They always run when they apply.

See it for yourself

Turn on debug logging in Lidarr and run a search. Each query appears as [Strategy Name] Search: '<query>', and the tier that ended the search appears as Tier N found X usable results.

Corrections are welcome. I'll update the post if anything's wrong.

I have just upgraded my hypervisor, and in the process did some optimization of all my containers and VMs, ensuring everything is up-to-date.

I noticed that Lidarr is showing I am on the latest version 3.1.0.4875 (2025-11-16). When I look at the GitHub repo, I can see that seems to be accurate, and everything since then is only "Pre-release". It seems I'm about 70 commits behind the latest pre-release.

Is that correct, or am I missing something?

I’ve read all the forums but just wanted to check one last time that there isn’t a way to disable the health alert for download handling?

I use Lidarr to search indexers for music. That’s it. I have SAB import the music straight to my Apple Music “Automatically Add” folder. The music is then matched to Apple Music. Later down the line I have Plex scan the Apple Music folder to ensure all my music is tagged correctly. Works a charm and ensures all my music is matched with Apple Music’s high quality library (high enough for me anyway)

But lidarr doesn’t like not managing the library for me and alerts me of this at every opportunity.

Work around or deal with it?

Thanks

Is it possible to define what metadata from musicbrainz gets written? For some reason lidarr will not write metadata for 'album artist' or 'album artist sort' so I have to manually add each new download into picard to add those. Would be nice to be able to do this automatically.

Need suggestions on the naming scheme and the folder organization in general.

Not usually in music so I'm a bit stuck here. Numbers at the start of each track doesn't look good in the eye for me at this point.

But I don't know, some albums care about the story as a whole so it matter sometimes. But again, not that into music.

Hello,

Love the ARR stack! I just added Lidarr to my Gluetun stack and I'm having problems with my large existing music library. When I add my existing library as the root folder, it picks up most of the media and imports it into the db, but there are several albums that do not get registered in the Lidarr db. It can see the file because they go into Unmapped. I tried adding them, but it does not change after running through the files again.

I checked my Metadata profile, and I have all the relevant primary and secondary types checked. I also set it up to tag all files.

These are not obscure albums - most of them are top 40. Am I doing something wrong? Is there a better way to import an existing library to make sure everything is picked up.

TIA for any assistance!

And wow, I wish I had started sooner.

I avoided it for along time because the UI is not that up to date and I assumed I'd have to have the entire *arr stack setup. Turns out nope. I can get a plugin to connect to slskd and even with just that it's incredible. I installed another plugin that automatically every hour grabs albums that are missing and it just works. No fiddling around with settings. Not fighting with my beets config. Or constantly trying different tools like soulsync.

My only complete is that I've struggled to setup any way to get more obscure music. Sometimes Lidarr will say an artist has no releases when they clearly do. But for now everything is awesome.

Anyways wasn't sure what flair to use so let's discuss our success with this awesome program.

I wanted music videos for the artists in my library without doing it all by hand, so I built a desktop app for it. I put it together with a lot of help from Claude (the AI). It's not a polished product, but it works for me and I thought others might find it useful.

It starts by reading your database for Lidarr, Kodi, Plex, Jellyfin or Emby to get a list of your artists and MusicBrainz IDs. Then it searches IMVDb, Wikipedia and YouTube for their videos and combines everything into one list. Missing years, albums and genres get filled in from your library and MusicBrainz. The list won't be perfect, so you can edit it yourself: rename a title, change a link, or exclude a song or a duplicate.

It downloads the videos with yt-dlp and puts them in the right folders for your media server, with NFO files, tags and artwork. Anything without an album or year is skipped. If you add the album or year yourself, it won't be skipped. After that you can go through the Review tab, play what you got, and replace or delete the ones that are wrong. You can also have it write a short description for each video. Once you've done every step by hand, Auto Run can keep going on a PC that's always on and fetch new videos by itself. By default it works overnight, but you can set the hours to all day.

The first tab is a Setup page that checks what you need and installs the Python packages for you. You need Python 3.10 or newer, ffmpeg, a free fanart.tv API key and your email for MusicBrainz. mpv is optional, for the player. You can import your settings from a previous version.

One thing to know: YouTube will block you if you download hundreds of videos without being signed in, so you'll want a cookies.txt from a spare Google account (not your main one). The README explains how. When a block starts the app stops, and Auto Run waits a few hours and carries on.

I've only tested it on Linux, but it should work on Windows too. I really dont know what needs to done on windows to make it work yet. It may just work idk.

Just to be clear i made this script with Claude AI with not mush knowledge of python. It works for me when i direct it to the lidarr database.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OBq64CKtVwbb46OAQu-kkZDy6ADaJqQe/view?usp=sharing

EDIT: Just updated the link to a newer version, will put this on github at some point. really it just up for testing. so still a few changes and possible bugs that may need fixing in future.

2nd EDIT: Last update on reddit for the file. I will move this over to github within the next week. Added BgUtils POT Provider helper script. it will start a docker or podman container. Info on the setup page.

3rd and final EDIT: i am in the process making this into a docker container with a web ui. so something similar to lidarr but for music videos. so that mean the desktop gui will go.

Does anybody have a decent solution on how to setup the Youtube download client for Lidarr? The trusted-session-generator project is apparently deprecated so I went with Invidious, no idea how to set it up for generating PoTokens and Visitor Data though.

I'm using the latest version of the Tubifarry plugin, slskd integration works like a charm but it still doesn't get me all the music I want.

If you have any recommendation for different download clients or indexers aswell I'm all ears, just want a working setup for my music needs.

Edit: I managed to make it work. The Tubifarry main branch is currently not working properly! Change to develop by entering this in the GitHub URL field: Tubifarry@TypNull#develop

Use "Youtube" as indexer and download client. Add the cookie.txt to both. You can extract it by using any browser addon that does this, just go to youtube.com, log in if you're not already and download the cookie.txt file. Then you can simply upload it to your server and link to it in the indexer and donwload client setup.

Hey all, just thought I’d share this with you all. Started building OpAmp almost a year ago, its a desktop client for the Plex Media Server that integrates into a few other services, like Lidarr for downloding suggestions, missing artist albums and by searching.

A few highlights:

• Transition modes
  • Off (gap)
  • Gapless
  • Sweet Fade
  • Beat Matching
• Playlist folders
• DJs
  • The ones known from Plexamp
  • Auto Mix - turns on Beat Matching and controls the queue by filling in bpm gaps and keeps the music going after your queue has ended
• Browse multiple servers as one
• Lyrics
• Mini/Flat/Full view modes
• Command Palette style search and action menus (ctrl/cmd+f, ctrl/cmd+k)

You can learn more about it on the website: https://opamp.app
and join the Discord if you want to help shape the app: https://discord.gg/vXqDEW3mrV

It’s Free. And available on macOS and Windows :)

A few months ago I shared Lyris here, my navidrome iOS player with a native Lidarr integration, and then Jellyfin support. A lot of you joined the beta, and your feedback shaped a huge part of the app. Thank you for that.

Today Lyris is officially on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6764873657

For those who missed it Lyris is an iOS navidrome and Jellyfin music player with a native Lidarr integration and a recomendation engine that recomend albums outside your library but based on your listening.

The app features:

- navidrome and Jellyfin support

- native Lidarr integration: search, add, done

- discovery that suggests stuff outside your library based on what you actually listen to

- CarPlay support

- offline downloads, smart playlists, lyrics, equalizer, and more

Pricing: free to download, 7-day free trial, then a one-time unlock. No subscription.

If you were a beta tester, update to the latest TestFlight build, there's a little thank-you discount code waiting for you in the app.

Can't wait to have your feedback!

I reorganized the Lidarr Wiki plugins page; let me know if I missed any or if you have any feedback.

https://wiki.servarr.com/lidarr/plugins

I've been missing a "Seerr for music", so I built one. Hearr sits in front of Lidarr: you browse music, and it sends what you pick to Lidarr.

What it does

- Charts: Deezer's Top 100 for the countries you choose (global, US, UK, FR, DE, TR…), plus top albums, artists and songs per genre

- Discover: artists similar to what's already in your Lidarr library

- New: recent releases from your artists

- Browsing: full discographies with 30-second previews

- Requests: one click to request an album. It asks for quality (your Lidarr profiles) and shows the estimated size and free disk space first.

- Status on every album: in library, downloading, searching, or "Search now" when Lidarr wants it but isn't looking

- Remove: unmonitors the album, deletes its files and deletes the seeding torrent

- Sign-in with Plex: only people you share your Plex server with get in, and only you can delete

- Recommended for you: personalised artist picks based on what's already in your Lidarr library. For each of your artists, Hearr pulls Deezer's "fans also like" list, skips anyone you already have, and ranks the rest by how many of your artists they're related to. So an artist similar to three of yours beats one similar to only one. Each card shows why ("Like Linkin Park, Evanescence").

How it works: music data comes from Deezer's public API, so there's no API key to set up. Requests go through Lidarr's own API and metadata, so Hearr doesn't need MusicBrainz access. It's a single Docker container (FastAPI + plain JS), MIT licensed, with images for amd64 and arm64.

Heads-up: it's early. I've tested it on one setup (Lidarr 3.1 + qBittorrent + Plex on a Mac mini). Brand-new singles sometimes aren't in Lidarr's metadata yet, and Hearr tells you when that happens instead of guessing. I built it with a lot of help from an AI coding assistant, and I've reviewed and tested it on my own server. Issues and PRs are welcome.

GitHub: https://github.com/nurulmac11/hearr

Hi everyone,

I've been using Lidarr for quite some time. Mostly without issues, even after switching to nightly build and using slskd plugin for downloads.

My music library has mostly been tagged correctly, but I had lots of unmapped files, some really old ones and it was basically a mess. So I decided to move all files that had root folder /music mapped in Lidarr, to another directory, take all files in single directory and tag them with MusicBrainzPicard. It tagged all files, and I even removed album covers, since those are not needed. Now, after testing something similar with a small batch with a fresh lidarr instance, I put some music files in root folder (structure: /music/file1.flac,file2.flac,file3.flac etc) it detected the artist correctly. I was then able to use "Preview Rename" feature and it renamed files to Artist/Album Name (release year)/songs without issue.

Now, after doing this with 100's of GB of data in my main Lidarr instance, it doesn't do that. I can go to Wanted tab, manual import. When I select that root folder, all of the files have missing Artist name, Album etc.

i have everything setup with tubifarry but i can't seem to get the downloads to work.

it finds the music but does nothing else
anyone else have this issue or know the fix?

TIA

Hi! I was monitoring how my Lidarr works and I see that all my torrent trackers are now unreachable due to cloudflare or capcha or other stuff. Cloudflare solvers felt kinda useless not even seeing that. So automatic downloads don't work for me any more.

Ok, I still can do the search and download manually and Lidarr would be providing info on new releases, renaming and tagging them. I have been downloading stuff before Lidarr too, you know... However, I can't find any way to set semi-auto system. Like, I click on wanted release and select a folder with downloaded files to allow Lidarr to process them. Its would be more convenient then moving, renaming and tagging them myself.

Is something like that possible?

Here is a music app that has built in Lidarr.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vinylock/id6808068524

Vinylock

Running MacOs Tahoe 26.6.2 and no matter what version of Lidarr I download, the master 3.1.0.4875 or develop 3.1.6.5078, I get an error about not being able to load when I go to the localhost:8686. I go through the login process and it accepts the password but never loads the web interface. From what I can tell, the app is still running in the background (downloads are created) but without a way to interact with it I'm a little stumped.

I have been working on a music library for a few weeks and recently noticed that the number of tracks found by Lidarr doesn't match the one listed by Navidrome. This difference currently is six tracks (Lidarr: 11007, Navidrome: 11013). Is there a way to find these tracks/files?

Hi, I have been researching, tinkering, reading old posts and scouring old threads for weeks and still cannot for the life of me get the path mappings right for slskd and lidarr.

After many attempts the download client is working and theyre communicating with each other but when the downloads appear on my server the albums are all in separate folders with a random string of characters in a sub folder of lidar within another sub folder and everytime I try to fix it it just gets worse and more complex/disorganized/convoluted. Lidarr also is not organizing or placing the albums into the artist folders it's creating after the albums are downloading. I've fiddled with the both the mappings and the settings in the web ui a thousand times.

I'm also confused about what the proper root folder in lidarr is supposed to be if it's different from the download folder.

I am new to self-hosting/this/doing my best to learn and did my prior research before asking for help but I'm at a loss here. Can someone please take a look at my mapping and help me figure out what I'm doing wrong here.

my slskd mappings are

Application data: /mnt/user/appdata/siskd/ - /app

Incomplete Path: /mnt/user/data/torrents/incomplete/music/ - app/incomplete

Downloads Path: /mnt/user/data/torrents/music/ - /app/downloads

Shared Paths: /mnt/user/data/media/music/ - /media

SLSKD_DOWNLOADS_DIR: /app/downloads

SLSKD_INCOMPLETE_DIR: /app/incomplete

my lidarr mappings are:

Path:/music: /mnt/user/data/media/music/ - /music

Path: /downloads: /mnt/user/data/torrents/music/ - /downloads

• Hi, I can't find any documentation on how this option works outside of the general description on the Tubifairy readme. Can anyone point me to a guide or help?
• When converting flac to mp3, what are the default settings that this uses?

I assume the custom rules are where I would define anything outside of the default, but I don't understand what format they want for "key" and "value" entries. Nothing I try removes the message below that says

"Custom conversion rules must be in the format 'source -> target' (e.g., mp3 to flac).

Lossy formats cannot be converted to non-lossy formats."

Can anyone share an example of how this is meant to be setup?

And also the metadata/tags as well.

I left using Lidarr back when the metadata was broken. Right now my music library is just jellyfin scanning the data folder. How is current state of Lidarr. Is the metadata working again. A clean library would be nice.

Hey, so for a while I had an issue where I got messages about albums deleted while they were never added.

Not really sure what I should include in this post here's my Lidarr version: ghcr.io/hotio/lidarr:release-571dea4