After I scripted imports of album lists into the Lidarr media tracking system back in 2023, I revisted it recently to import some more. However, I found the Lidarr project itself in state of disarray, with multiple users complaining of a broken metadata API for weeks and weeks. In fact, the devs acknowledged the issue and indicated they had no ETA for fix:
Lidarr Workarounds
Digging into the Lidarr Discord for support, I found a fork from blampe that seemed to help somewhat. However, the issue with broken metadata lookups involved server side as well, so this wasn’t a final solution.
Spotify Playlist Import
A common way to share album lists these days seems to be Spotify. I’ve never been a subscriber myself so I looked for tools to extract an album list from Spotify into a CSV file that I could then import into Lidarr. This sounds easy, but the slight variation in naming of artists and albums makes this a challenging data cleanup problem.
To start with, I used Spotlistr generate the CSV file with appropriate fields from the Spotify playlist:
Then I used my lidarrtools scripts, to complete the import from CSV file into my Lidarr instance, working around missing meta-data.
Soulseek Alternatives
As I was looking at my music library, I stumbled across Soulseek as an alternative means of sourcing music, for import into Lidarr. In my case, I am running Unraid so I found Docker templates for ‘slskd’ and ‘soularr’. Soularr is a headless Python script that connects Soulseek and Lidarr.
Here’s the configuration for Soulseek:
Here’s the configuration for Soularr:
I needed to edit the slskd.yml file at /mnt/user/appdata/slskd to set an urlbase of /slskd (behind my SWAG proxy) and add an api_key for connection by Soularr.
Then I needed to create a config.ini file at /mnt/user/appdata/soularr, filling in the lidarr and slskd sections:
Then port-forwarded 50300 and 50301 on my router to allow for Soulseek traffic. After this, Soularr seemed to start querying Soulseek for missing albums, and then importing them into Lidarr.
Conclusion
UPDATE: Eventually in August, the Lidarr devs deployed a new metadata service that began to correct the missing API hits for artist & album searches. Big thanks to them for improving Lidarr, a very useful bit of software.
More in this series…
- Lidarr Importing - Scripting album imports