I am almost done building my first self hosted streambox through Docker. That's a total of 16 instances, each fulfilling 1 specific role.
As I'm new to the *arr world, could you please help me understand why it is standard to deploy multiple *arr services for each media type (ex: readarr1 for books + readarr2 for audiobooks) instead of using 1 that does multiple media types?
Thank you.
"There is always a relevant XKCD"
That will be one big bloated software extremely painful to maintain.
People have tried and failed to make the "one arr to rule them all" but the current stack is pretty lightweight, stable and mature so it is better to just install them all in containers then have some kind of frontend and request system in front of them for users and admins.
I use Organizr as a frontend (keeps them all together in one interface and optionally handles SSO across all of them) then I have Overseerr for users to add media without having to give them access to the arrs directly.
I think they could make it more modular. Obviously there is a ton of commonality between these apps
Because it makes more sense to have software do one thing good and not many things bad. There are many examples of this, iTunes is a classic but also Jellyfin, I like that they're focussing on video because that is very complex in itself. To also do comics, podcasts, audiobooks, comics, books etc. meana much more complexity, things that can influence and trip each other, diversion of work etc. Yes, would be very cool to have one app that can play everything perfectly but that's almost impossible. To do one thing good isn't.
iTunes is a double edged sword in that regard, given that while it initially innovated as a digital music distribution storefront, as more and more features were added to it, it started juggling too many tasks at once instead of continuing to innovate with just one.
because it isn't a very good idea to keep a huge illegal library in one place, maybe
Arrs are not for doing that but organizing it.
You can legally rip your own shit and keep it on the server.
