Sonarr the Library for Managing TV Series

This post is part of the whole series on obtaining multimedia content. In the previous post we saw how to configure Prowlarr in order to centralize certain information and propagate it to other platforms. In this post we'll take a look at one of those applications that benefits from that setup: Sonarr, which allows us to manage our TV series.

This blog is not responsible for any misuse of these instructions and does not tolerate piracy under any circumstances.

1 - What is Sonarr?

Sonarr is an application, also installable as a Docker container or through Portainer, which is in charge of managing everything related to the series we want to obtain.

With Sonarr, you can identify which episodes you have available, and when new episodes will be released.

You can configure Sonarr to automatically download episodes in the quality you specify.

2 - How to install Sonarr

To install Sonarr, all you need to do is place the following code inside the docker-compose file.

sonarr:  image: linuxserver/sonarr  container_name: sonarr  ports:    - 8989:8989  volumes:    - D:\Server-config\sonarr:/config     - D:\temp\downloads\complete:/downloads/complete     - D:\temp\downloads:/downloads    - D:\Documents\Shows:/storage/TV  environment:    TZ: Europe/Dublin

With this, you just need to visit the URL http://{ip-server}:8989/ to access the application.

The rest of the information is as follows: you must specify the path where the content will be downloaded. If you followed the Transmission post for the torrent client, you will see that we use the same path to indicate the downloads.

Additionally, specify the path where the configuration will be stored and, finally, where you plan to keep them permanently.

Once you log in, this is what you will see:

3 - Searching for content in Sonarr

To search content in Sonarr, just use the top search bar or click "add new" for a larger search field.

You can search by name or by IMDb ID. For example, if you search for Game of Thrones:

If you click, a window will appear to add the content and provide certain information. Here you can specify the following:

1. The folder on your hard drive where the episodes will go
2. Monitor episodes as they become available
3. The quality you want to download
4. Series type (regular or anime)
5. Whether you want a folder per season or all in the same

Then, in the menu at the bottom, there are two boxes you can check off. The most important is the first one, which, if checked, will start searching for all episodes you chose to monitor.

And finally, the green button to add the series to your library.

For now, simply click the green button to add the series to your library. If you click on it, you'll open the internal library view and, as you can see, everything is red because you do not have any content yet.

To find this content, you must click on the episode and then search -> interactive search; but unfortunately nothing will appear, as we have not yet told Sonarr where to search or how to download it.

• Note: Be careful using quick search, at least for now, since it will search for and download the first link it finds, and you might end up with a single episode of 20GB.

4 - Add indexer to Sonarr

An indexer is, simply put, the place where you search for content to download.

Personally, I recommend using Prowlarr, which was already discussed in a previous post. This is because Prowlarr allows us to centralize indexers in one place. If we change configuration in the indexer, this propagates to all other applications.

Link to Prowlarr.

But if you do not want to use Prowlarr, you can add these indexers manually. To do so, go to Settings -> Indexers and click + to add a new one.

Personally, I use Rarbg, which integrates directly with Sonarr, but all the content is in English. If you want to add one that's not in the list or is private, you'll need to know whether it is Newznab or Torznab, for example, and enter the configuration. If you do it through Prowlarr, you have a search tool and so on.

Once configured, you can go to the series and search, and you will see Sonarr find content:

In this screenshot we have a lot of information, from left to right:

1. Where the content comes from.
2. Days since the content was created.
3. The content title, which usually includes the quality, source, or even the codec. H265 is very good right now because it results in much smaller file sizes than h264 (about 15–20% smaller).
4. The indexer from which the file originates.
5. File size.
6. The number of users who have the complete file, and those who have it incomplete—together they are called Peers, essentially users from whom you will get the content.
   1. Ideally, it should be blue with a high first number. If the first number is 0, it's unlikely you'll get the file, as at least at that moment, nobody has the complete file. Maybe someone will connect later and you'll get it, or maybe it will never be shared again.
7. Language. As I said, it's always easier in English, especially on public torrents. For Spanish, there are very good private trackers.
8. File quality.
9. You can indicate filters or preferred tags here; for example, if you prefer codec 265, you can set an alert here.
10. Alerts. In Sonarr, you can create filters or conditions, for example to download only 1080p content. If it's not 1080, that alert will show, as well as if there are no seeders sharing the file.
11. Finally, the download button.

When you click download, Sonarr will send the information to your torrent application.

• Note: This process is the same in all -arr applications.

5 - Add a download client to Sonarr

To download content, you need a download client. We already saw in another post how to configure Transmission, a bittorrent client on our server. What we have to do now is link it with Sonarr.

To do that, go to settings -> Download Client and click +. There, specify the client. In my case, it's Transmission, and complete the information:

Now you can go to the series you want and download content. If you go back and click download, you'll see an alert in the sidebar under activity, and you'll also see that file in the torrent client:

6 - Monitoring content in Sonarr

One of Sonarr's greatest features is its ability to monitor content. This includes waiting for a new episode to become available or searching for existing content and downloading it automatically.

It's a very powerful feature, but you need to be careful, since using the default values can lead to very large files—really large files.

6.1 - Configure Sonarr to download files of a moderate size

Personally, I am not very picky. My TV is 1080p and I often watch content from my phone, especially series. For that reason, on my server I have two settings: 1080p and 720p for when I watch from my phone.

The first thing I do is go to settings -> quality. Here you see the configuration for file size per minute. As I said, I only care about 720p and 1080p, so I set everything lower almost to the minimum, and increase the ranges for these two qualities.

For 720p, I set a maximum size of about 25MB per minute, compared to the 130MB default. For 1080p, about 43MB per minute, versus the 400MB default value.

If you have a 4K TV, you'll need to decide what sizes work for you.

What does this mean? Well, for example, if you have a 40-minute episode, it will take up about 900MB in 1080p (and 600MB in 720p), while with the default value I've had episodes as large as 11GB—a single episode!

Secondly, you should go to settings -> Profiles and remove all existing ones, because we're going to use our own profiles reflecting the changes we made in the previous view.

Finally, when adding a new series, we'll now monitor and set it to auto-search, so it will only download episodes that match the filters we've set in the profile:

• The same happens with new episodes released from the series you're following.

Conclusion

In this post we have seen what Sonarr is.

How to configure Sonarr to automatically download content.

Key features of Sonarr.