I’ve installed Sonarr on my Windows 8.1 media PC, setup nzb and torrent indexers (which all test ok), and added Sabnzbd and uTorrent download clients (which also test ok). My existing media library imported without any errors.
When I add a new series, it adds the seasons and episodes to the list, but it doesn’t download them, even with the status set to monitored. Each episode is shown as “Episode missing from disk”. I am assuming that I am missing something in either the configuration or workflow, but can’t work out what. I’d be grateful for any suggestions, please.
Common misconception . Sonarr will not automatically search for old episodes, you have to tell it to do so.
Sonarr works by pulling the RSS feed from your indexers periodically (e.g. once every 15 minutes or however you configure it). If any episode on there is wanted, it will send the nzb to your downloader.
So if nobody (re-)posts the episodes you want, they will never be automatically found and downloaded.
If you add a new show, nowadays you have an “add & search” button, which will add the series and then does a historical search for all the episodes on your indexers. (I think this might be only available in develop, I’m not 100% sure).
The other way is to use the search buttons when you are in a series detail page. You can have sonarr search for all episodes in the entire series, a particular season, or even just a single episode. The button looks like a magnifying glass.
Thanks for your reply. I found the search in the Wanted list too, so I clicked Search All Missing from there. It seems to be on the case.
I would imagine that anyone moving over from Sickbeard would make the same assumption I did, yet it isn’t made clear in any of the documentation I found. I hope that the “add & search” option makes its way into the production version soon.
This is a little confusing for me as well. Let’s say I add a TV series. Sonarr then reaches out to my indexers and finds some of the episodes, but not all of them. Will Sonarr continue to search for the missing episodes automatically or do I have to manually go into the “WANTED” area or manual search while in the series?
Right now I have 7 indexers setup.
DogNZB NZB.SU
nzbgeek
NZBndx
Omgwtfnzbs
Oznzb
and with all those indexers I usually come out pretty good in the end with finding stuff. I also have three news services that I use. Supernews, EasyNews, and Tweaknews, but I may change that around since I think two of them are Highwinds providers. I want to diversify my NNTP access. When adding a series is it best to select ALL under the “monitor” section? I do look at all the help pop ups, which are fantastic but just to get a little clarification, that’s all.
Sonarr automagically gets new\missing\cutoff episodes from RSS, so make sure you have RSS enabled on all your indexers
So based on that… you do a missing search once, that uses API search once, it finds it cans etc, theres no point in doing the same API search all the time, the results wont have changed, as if there was something new posted since your last search, it would have come through on your RSS, and you would already have it…
I’m still confused. I did a manual search, as per your suggestion, and all the downloads were attempted, but failed. I have failed download handling switched on and if I do a manual search I can see all the episodes are available as torrents, but they aren’t being grabbed.
Do you see a red exclamation mark behind the releases, in the manual search results? That will tell you why it was not grabbed. This can be any number of reasons, like the size is too big/small, incorrect language, incorrect quality, …
Edit: wait… "downloads were attempted"
Are you saying you actually saw sonarr grab torrents and send them to your torrent client?
I saw the downloads being attempted in SABnzbd (newsgroups are my preferred option, but I also have a torrent download client set up), and received failed download emails (also from SABnzbd). The failed episodes are all in the blacklist.
I noticed the availability of torrents when I did a manual search after the initial download failure and no subsequent activity.
Failed downloads: probably the attempted nzb downloads are out of your usenet servers’ retention or else DMCA’d (removed on request of copyright holders).
Sonarr will detect the failed download in sab, and blacklist the release. So far this is expected behavior.
It will then run another search for the episode, and should queue up a torrent if no “okay” nzb is available anymore. Ofcourse this will only happen if the torrent is considered “okay” by sonarr, e.g. quality, size, etc etc. See explanation above, you can easily verify this by doing a manual search once.
If you see no exclamation marks, it means sonarr should have automatically grabbed that release. In that case something else may be wrong.
I did a manual search on one of the failed episodes, it came up with about 15 torrents, only 2 of which had exclamation marks, so I guess something is wrong with my setup.
. Sonarr will not automatically search for old episodes, you have to tell it to do so.