The *arr stack in plain English
If you have heard people talk about “the *arr stack” and felt lost, this section is for you. By the end you’ll know what each piece does. You install the apps; OrgoMedia connects to each one, sets them up to choose good-quality copies, and handles the renaming.
“*arr” is shorthand for a group of free, open-source apps whose names happen to end in “arr”: Radarr, Sonarr, Prowlarr, and friends. Each one automates a single step of keeping a media library tidy. Used together they form a “stack”, a little assembly line for your media. Here are the players:
| Piece | What it actually does, in one sentence |
|---|---|
| Plex (or Jellyfin / Emby) | Your “personal Netflix”: the app on your TV and phone that plays your library with posters, descriptions, and resume-where-you-left-off. |
| Radarr | Watches for movies you want and grabs them when a good copy appears. |
| Sonarr | The same idea but for TV shows and anime. It tracks seasons and episodes. |
| Prowlarr | The address book of indexers (the sources Radarr and Sonarr search). Set it up once, and it shares those sources with the others. |
| A client | The app that actually fetches the file once something is found. You set it up once inside Radarr and Sonarr; OrgoMedia never connects to it directly, it reads progress from the *arr apps. |
| An indexer | A searchable catalog that tells the *arr apps where a given title can be found. |
| TRaSH Guides | A community-maintained set of recommended quality settings, so you don’t have to become an expert on codecs and bitrates. |
Where OrgoMedia fits
The classic *arr stack has one famous weak spot: naming and organizing the finished file, especially for anime, which uses wildly inconsistent numbering. That last mile is exactly what OrgoMedia owns. It also gives the whole stack something it never had: a beautiful native Mac control panel and an iPhone app, so you and your household drive everything from friendly screens instead of a dozen browser tabs.