What is Lidarr and how is it different from Sonarr?

Lidarr is the music member of the arr family. It works almost exactly like Sonarr, but instead of TV series and episodes it tracks artists and albums. You add an artist, Lidarr monitors for their releases, searches your indexers through Prowlarr, downloads matches, and files them tagged and renamed into your music library.

Does Lidarr use the same indexers as Sonarr and Radarr?

Yes. Lidarr registers with Prowlarr as an application just like Sonarr and Radarr, so any indexer you add in Prowlarr syncs to it automatically. It also shares your download client. You reuse the infrastructure you already built for movies and TV and just point music at it.

Where does Lidarr get its music metadata?

Lidarr identifies artists and albums using MusicBrainz, the community music database. That is why an artist has to exist in MusicBrainz for Lidarr to track them, and why occasionally a very new or obscure release needs its MusicBrainz entry updated before Lidarr can match it.

Can Plex or Jellyfin play the music Lidarr downloads?

Yes. Lidarr tags and organizes files into a clean folder structure, and any music-capable server — Plex, Jellyfin, or a dedicated music server like Navidrome — can point at that library and stream it. Lidarr manages acquisition and organization; the media server handles playback.

Lidarr: Automate Your Music Library Like Sonarr

On this page

What Lidarr actually does
Task 1: Deploy the container
Task 2: Reuse Prowlarr and your download client
Task 3: Set the library, quality, and metadata
What’s next

Your Arr stack already handles movies and TV — you follow a show and new episodes just appear. Music is the one library still stuck in the old way: manually finding albums, downloading them, and fighting with folder names and tags. Lidarr fixes that. It’s Sonarr’s logic pointed at music: follow an artist once, and new albums arrive downloaded, tagged, and filed on their own.

The best part is you’ve already built the hard part. Lidarr reuses the same Prowlarr indexers and download client as the rest of your stack. Below is the deploy and the wiring that gets music flowing.

First: make these values your own

Commands below use placeholder values — swap in yours before running:

<host-ip> — the LAN IP of the machine running your stack (e.g. 192.168.1.50)
TZ=America/New_York — your own timezone
PUID/PGID (1000 here) — must match the user that owns your media files
Service ports (9696 Prowlarr) — change only if you moved them off the defaults
YOUR_PROWLARR_API_KEY — copied from Prowlarr, kept in your secret store, never pasted into a note

Rule of thumb: if a value looks specific to one machine, it’s a placeholder to change — not a literal to copy.

What this stack is for

Everything in this guide automates managing and streaming media you have the rights to — your own rips, DRM-free purchases, home video, Linux ISOs, and public-domain or Creative Commons releases. Downloading copyrighted material you haven't paid for is illegal in most places, and it isn't what this guide teaches. What you point these tools at is on you.

What Lidarr actually does

If you’ve read what the Arr stack is, Lidarr will feel instantly familiar — it’s the same pipeline with music-shaped nouns:

Follow — you add an artist and choose to monitor their existing albums, only future ones, or everything.
Identify — Lidarr matches artists and albums against MusicBrainz, the open music database, so it knows exactly what a complete discography looks like.
Search & grab — for anything monitored and missing, it queries your Prowlarr indexers and sends the best match to your download client.
Tag & file — on import it renames and organizes the files into a clean, tagged folder structure that Plex, Jellyfin, or a dedicated music server can read.

It's the Sonarr engine, retuned

Lidarr shares Sonarr and Radarr’s codebase and interface, so quality profiles, indexer sync, and download-client handling all work the same way. If you can drive Sonarr, you already know Lidarr — the only new concept is MusicBrainz as the metadata source.

Task 1: Deploy the container

Run Lidarr alongside the rest of your stack, sharing the same Docker host and the same /data media root so imports stay instant hardlinks instead of slow copies.

1Add the service to your compose file3 min

Add to your media docker-compose.yml


lidarr:
  image: lscr.io/linuxserver/lidarr:latest
  container_name: lidarr
  environment:
    - PUID=1000
    - PGID=1000
    - TZ=America/New_York
  ports:
    - "8686:8686"
  volumes:
    - ./lidarr/config:/config
    - /data:/data
  restart: unless-stopped

The /data:/data mount must match the one your download client and other Arr apps use, so a finished download hardlinks into the music library instead of copying.

2Bring it up and open the UI2 min

Start it


docker compose up -d lidarr
docker compose logs -f lidarr

Then browse to http://<host-ip>:8686 to reach the web UI.

Task 2: Reuse Prowlarr and your download client

Because Lidarr speaks the same protocol as Sonarr and Radarr, you don’t add indexers to it directly — you let Prowlarr push them in.

1Register Lidarr in Prowlarr4 min

In Prowlarr, go to Settings → Apps → Add → Lidarr, enter Lidarr’s address (http://<host-ip>:8686) and API key, and sync. Every music-capable indexer you already have flows straight into Lidarr — no per-app indexer setup.

2Add your download client3 min

Under Settings → Download Clients in Lidarr, add the same client the rest of your stack uses (for example qBittorrent behind your VPN). Give music its own category so downloads land in a predictable folder.

Music indexers are their own thing

General movie/TV indexers often carry little music. If music results are thin, the gap is almost always upstream in Prowlarr — add indexers that actually specialize in music rather than tuning Lidarr.

Task 3: Set the library, quality, and metadata

1Add a root folder and quality profile4 min

Under Settings → Media Management, set the root folder to your music path (e.g. /data/media/music). Then pick a quality profile — FLAC for lossless, a good MP3 bitrate for smaller files, or a profile that allows both and prefers lossless. The community TRaSH Guides for Lidarr are the reference for tuning these.

2Follow your first artistsvaries

Search for an artist, choose a monitor option (all albums, future only, latest), and a metadata profile that decides which release types to grab — studio albums only, or also EPs, singles, and live records. Start narrow; “everything for everyone” fills a disk fast.

MusicBrainz is the source of truth

Lidarr can only track what MusicBrainz knows about. A brand-new or obscure release that isn’t in MusicBrainz yet won’t match until the entry exists — occasionally you’ll add or correct it there, and Lidarr picks up the change on its next refresh.

What’s next

With Lidarr running, the *arr family covers the media that actually fills a household library — movies, TV, and now music — all driven by the same Prowlarr indexers and download client. If you haven’t added it yet, Bazarr rounds out the video side by fetching subtitles automatically.

Once everything is this automated, the piece worth adding is knowing it stays healthy — the self-healing Arr stack covers catching the day a key rotates or a download client quietly dies.

Related posts:

What Is the Arr Stack? Sonarr, Radarr, and Prowlarr Explained — the concepts Lidarr reuses
Deploy the Arr Stack with Docker Compose — the shared layout and download client
Automating the Arr Stack — import lists and quality profiles, the same ideas for music
Bazarr: Automatic Subtitles for Your Arr Stack — the subtitle companion for the video side
Jellyseerr: Let Your Family Request Movies Themselves — the request front end for the stack
The Self-Healing Arr Stack — keep the pipeline alive when a piece silently fails
Install Plex Media Server on a NAS or Proxmox LXC — a server that can stream your music library

Comments

Comments are powered by GitHub Discussions — sign in with a GitHub account to join the conversation.