Anime language tiers (Raw, Sub, Dub, Dual Audio)

This Feature Request is more of a pipedream, but I am opening it up so that we can at least discuss options. In anime, releases are pretty much universally categorized into 4 main buckets

  1. Raw – No subs matching language profile, original audio
  2. Sub – Subs matching language profile + potentially other subs matching other languages, original audio
  3. Dub – May contain subs for songs/signs, audio matching language profile
  4. Dual Audio – Subs matching language profile, original audio + audio matching Language profile audio + potentially other audio streams for other languages

I would argue that most people have preferences for one of the above, and those preferences could differ based on the series.

This leads to the question if something like this can be developed in Sonarr. At a high level, I think there’s no real easy options for automating it. While some groups may tag their releases with terms identifying it as raw, sub, dub, or dual, others do not. It is fairly inconsistent from my experience. Instead, creating similar tiers using Preferred Words and release groups is a much more reasonable alternative.

However, one thing I was thinking is that while it is not really possible to identify releases while grabbing, it should be possible to identify and classify the release on import since MediaInfo would have all the relevant data. As of right now, I have to include these terms into my naming scheme, and try to scroll through large filenames to determine which category the release belongs to. Maybe Sonarr can display the identified Subtitle and Audio Languages in the file (not the episode Language since that’s different and not based on MediaInfo) as an optional column on the Series Details page? Sonarr must be storing it since they are available as naming tokens. Even better would be an ability for Sonarr to classify the release into the groups automatically considering the Language Profile.

I realize that a lot of this is dependent on the groups properly classifying Sub and Audio streams for their files, but I have found that to be significantly more consistent in anime releases than standard releases (since they depend so much on language). At the very least, there can maybe some discussion/thoughts floated on the subject, since I assume it is a common concern for people who are downloading anime.

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