The Artists index is the main view of your library. Each row represents an artist Lidarr is tracking, with columns showing monitoring status, quality and metadata profiles, album count, track availability, path, tags, and disk size.
The toolbar's View toggle switches between four display modes:
The toolbar above the artist list contains the following actions:
The Filter button narrows the artist list. Built-in filters:
Clicking an artist's name opens their detail page, which shows the artist biography, a full list of release groups, and the per-album track breakdown. From here you can:
The Add New tab is where you search for and add artists to Lidarr. Search by name or paste a MusicBrainz artist ID directly (prefixed with lidarr:, for example, lidarr:9255f594-b912-4bdf-87a2-ada04502a459). See Finding music and MusicBrainz in the FAQ if an artist is hard to find.
When adding an artist you will set:
Monitor is a one-time action, applied to whatever albums Lidarr already has on file at the moment it runs, whether that's when you first add the artist, or later via the Update Monitoring bulk action. It does not reach forward to catch albums added to MusicBrainz afterward; that's what Monitor New Items is for.
| Option | Sets monitored to true for |
|---|---|
| All Albums | Every album. |
| Future Albums | Albums with no file that have a release date in the future. Already-released albums, with or without a file, are unmonitored. |
| Missing Albums | Albums with no file, whether already released or upcoming. |
| Existing Albums | Albums that already have a file. |
| First Album | Only the album with the earliest release date. |
| Latest Album | Only the album with the most recent release date. |
| None | Nothing. |
The in-app tooltip for Existing Albums currently reads "Monitor albums that have files or have not released yet," which duplicates the Missing Albums wording and doesn't match what the option does. Based on
AlbumMonitoredService.cs, Existing Albums monitors only albums that already have a file.
Monitor New Items is an ongoing, artist-level setting. Unlike Monitor above, it doesn't run once — it fires every time a metadata refresh finds an album for this artist that isn't already in Lidarr's database.
| Option | Behavior |
|---|---|
| All Albums | Monitor every newly discovered album. |
| New Albums | Monitor a newly discovered album only if its release date is on or after the most recent release date Lidarr already has on file for that artist. |
| None | Leave newly discovered albums unmonitored. |
New Albums is a release-date comparison against your existing catalog, not a check of when MusicBrainz added the album to its database. An album that has existed on MusicBrainz for years but is only now appearing in Lidarr (for example, after a merge or a metadata correction) is monitored or skipped based purely on its release date relative to what you already have, regardless of when it showed up in Lidarr.
Monitor and Monitor New Items are easy to conflate, and setting Monitor = Future Albums does not give you the same result as Monitor New Items = New Albums. Monitor only ever looks at albums Lidarr already knows about at the instant it runs. If MusicBrainz adds a new future release to an artist's discography afterward, Monitor won't touch it; only Monitor New Items decides what happens to it when Lidarr's next refresh picks it up.
Library Import is for bringing an existing organised music collection into Lidarr. It scans a root folder, matches what it finds to MusicBrainz release groups, and imports matched files into Lidarr's library without moving or copying them.
See Importing an Existing Library for the full walkthrough, including how to prepare your files, what the matching thresholds are, and what to do when files don't match automatically.
Library Import is for an already-organised library. To import files from a download folder, use Manual Import from the toolbar instead.