Glossary
Terms used on this site, defined plainly
Music discovery inherits vocabulary from music services, self-hosting inherits it from *arr, and the overlap confuses people. Here is what each term means in this context specifically.
- Flow
- A playlist that Aurral rebuilds on a schedule. Its files are temporary and live under a _flows folder until you keep them.
- Static playlist
- A playlist with a fixed tracklist, either imported from another service or saved from a flow. Files are permanent.
- Seed artist
- An artist Aurral uses as the starting point for your recommendations. Seeds come from your likes, your listening history and a rotating sample of your library.
- Source mix
- The proportions that decide where a flow's tracks come from: Discover, Library, Trending and Focus.
- Focus
- The one flow source you configure by hand. You give it tags, related artists or a year range, and it looks outside your library for matches.
- Deep Dive
- A switch that moves a flow from each artist's top ten tracks to tracks ten through twenty-five, so popular artists stop dominating a mix.
- Cutoff
- The lowest quality tier a flow or album download will accept. Tiers at or above it are Preferred, tiers below it are Upgrade candidates.
- MBID
- A MusicBrainz identifier. It is the join key between your file tags, the metadata catalogue and Lidarr, which is why Aurral insists on it.
- Monitored
- A flag that lets Aurral or Lidarr act on its own. Downloading something marks it monitored; unmonitoring never deletes files.
- Review queue
- Where a download waits when its identity or duration could not be verified. Approve it or deny it and the search reruns without that file.
- Wanted
- The list of library tracks that need work: Missing for failed downloads, Cutoff unmet for files below your quality floor.
- Subsonic API
- An HTTP API shape that dozens of music players already speak. Implementing /rest is what lets those apps connect to Aurral.
- Lidarr custom list
- A URL that Lidarr polls as if it were a list of releases. Every flow can publish one.
- Discovery mode
- A global dial from Safer through Balanced to Deeper, deciding how far outside your library recommendations are allowed to reach.
- Blocklist
- Artists you excluded. They disappear from recommendations, playlist previews and future downloads, for your account only.
Read the terms in context
Flows
Source mix, Focus and Deep Dive explained properly.
Quality profiles
What the cutoff does and why files are verified.
Discover
Seed artists and the recommendation ranking.
Playlists
Static playlists, sync schedules and imports.
Subsonic API
The protocol that makes phone apps work.
Lidarr integration
Monitoring and the management handover.
The vocabulary was the hard part
Once these make sense, the rest is configuration. Start with one Flow and let the settings settle from there.