I never said I agreed with leeching, but if you’ve ever used soulseek you would know its a rampant issue on the platform

This is not legal advice, and I cannot speak if this applies to the country you live in. Most of the time, you will only receive a notice in the mail if you are uploading content, not downloading. Look into a program called Soulseek, it’s essentially what replaced Limewire, and it gives you the option to search for files without sharing anything back. You will likely run into issues grabbing full albums as leeching (not sharing files while downloading) is frowned upon

There is a *darr program (tdarr maybe) that you can use to on-the-fly convert media, but unless you know what you’re doing you’ll just waste power/time over looking for torrents that are already HEVC. Also, depending on the age of the content, HEVC really wont save that much space.

Lidarr and Readarr DO work, but it relies on community support for it to be incredibly accurate (IIRC Lidarr uses Musicbrainz for its backend, and unless someone had added an album there you wont ever pull metadata for it) and takes a lot more time to correctly set up and configure in my experience.

There are a few guides as far as “the best” settings for media, trash guides comes to mind but his guides are aimed at having everything in “the best format” vs saving space

Just make sure to verify how much space these hold before actually using them