Help avoiding mangling of existing anime series & downloading airing shows?

[Runsamok]

Is there any way to get Sonarr to use Anidb-style handling of anime series vs the current TVDB-style smooshing of related but separate series into one multi-headed hydra of seasons & specials?

As an example, I’ll use Mobile Suit Gundam SEED. AniDB lists SEED, its follow up series SEED Destiny and the related two Mobile Suit MSV Astray shorts & three part Stargazer OVA as separate, but related series. TVDB lists SEED as Season 1, SEED Destiny as Season 2, the MSV Astray series as Specials & the Stargazer OVA as a separate series. And when I look at the series as it’s listed in my Sonarr library it’s got nearly the same setup as TVDB but lists it Stargazer as a special & not a separate series. No consistency.

I’m not currently using Sonarr to manage my downloads for anime as it stands as there’s no easy way to specify release groups for fansubs, but have been manually dropping new episodes into the season folders & using the built in Organize function to handle the renaming & such (it’s utterly amazing the 99% of the time it figures out what it’s looking at). Meanwhile my anime sits in folders split out as per AniDB so that it can be correctly scraped into Kodi using the AniDB scraper as it always has been (I moved from Sab/Sickrage to NZBGet/Sonarr after a hardware failure meant I needed to rebuild the HTPC software stack). I guess I can just remove all my anime from Sonarr’s purview & install SickRage to handle it, but I really dig the Sonarr vibe & would prefer to keep everything under one roof as it were.

Should I just give up on Sonarr for non-Western tv or is there something I’m missing?

[markus101]

The short answer is no, you can’t use anidb numbering.

A bit longer answer is Sonarr translates from scene numbering to TVDB numbering using thexem.de, not sure how closely the releases follow anidb’s numbering but I do know they reset the numbering for each “season” (in TVDB’s world) and Sonarr handles that well.

You’re probably best hitting up our IRC channel to discuss anime as the most knowledgeable anime users hang out there.

[Runsamok]

Ah, I didn’t realize there was another layer of “smart” automation mucking things up.

If there’s no way to avoid jamming square-peg anime into round-hole Western paradigms I guess I’d best find another solution to handle my needs. I’ll see if I can rustle up some help on the IRC channel but it doesn’t look like Sonarr has the anime support I thought it did.

Thanks for the response!