I thought it would be pretty self-evident from using it, but I can’t figure out the Drone Factory. I have my downloads folder set, and it is completely different from my Shows folder. Shows that are actually downloaded by Sonarr get transferred over just fine. But any time I download a show outside of Sonarr (like from a private tracker), they are not consistently picked up. The only way I’ve been able to get these shows to get found has been to manually copy them over to the Shows older and then tell Sonarr to update. That works sometimes but still not always.
How is this feature supposed to work? Am I not understanding its aim?
That’s a shame, I actually really like the idea of an automated agent who picks up my stray episodes downloaded from outside Sonarr. But OK, at least now I know… manual import if the Drone fails. Thanks!
Drone Factory will never work nicely with torrents unless you move them into the Factory folder after the download completes, which still makes it a manual action. You wouldn’t want Sonarr to import a file that is still downloading. The Factory can still be nice for files and especially packs that you downloaded through other means as long as you know that all the file names can be recognized by Sonarr but in all other cases the manual import would be a better idea.
But that’s exactly what I do, and it’s not a manual action. My downloads happen in an “Incomplete Downloads” folder and upon completion, they are moved into my “New Downloads” folder which is my Drone Factory.
I think I’ve figured out why it doesn’t work. It doesn’t seem to see any files more than 2 folders deep. So for example if I download an entire show pack with all seasons, it will be structured like…
Show Title > Season x > Episode Y File
or possibly even…
Show Title > Season x > Episode Y > Episode Y File
Shows in this format never seem to get picked up. But if I drag the episode files out and drop them directly into the drone factory, then they ARE picked up.
Anyway, I still love the whole idea as I’m a big fan of automation, watch folders, etc. Now that I better understand how it works, I think it probably is working as designed and is quite useful. Thanks!
If you want automated downloading you should be using a client that actually supports that with Sonarr rather than the Drone Factory. The DF has its uses but automation of regular downloads is not one of them.
Well as far as I can tell my client (Utorrent) does support automatic Sonarr imports, since they have been happening. But since I’m still a fairly new user of Sonarr, I hadn’t known that Sonarr would already pick that sort of thing up, I thought that was what it used the DF for. For the time being I’ve turned off the DF completely as it was just resulting in lots and lots of pointless scans of files in it that will never be imported. Appreciate all the insight into DF.
OK, maybe I’m misunderstanding how Sonarr works with regards to importing shows that it has fetched. I expected that, if Sonarr initiated the fetch, then it would know to import the show to the correct location on completion. But that isn’t happening now that I’ve turned off DF.
Now, a show begins downloading to my Incomplete folder. Upon completion, UTorrent moves it into my Completed folder, and Sonarr never pulls it into the shows directory structure. I guess the only reason this was ever behaving “properly” was actually DF at work, and I just didn’t know it. So, without DF… how do I get Sonarr to automatically import things? Does UTorrent not actually support this capability?
Completed download handling is turned on, that’s why I was so confused that it doesn’t seem to work unless I use the DF. And I’m using the latest version of UTorrent with Web UI enabled. What else am I missing?
Well download handling definitely is not working. I’m looking at an episode of one of my shows (Limitless) right now that is sitting in my “Completed” folder, and has not been imported into Sonarr. As far as I can tell everything is enabled… though I do wonder how Sonarr is supposed to use the web UI of UTorrent. Web UI has a username & password and Sonarr is unaware of that as far as I can tell. Do I have to tell Sonarr about this somewhere?
Settings > Download Client > Add > uTorrent asks to provide a user/pass…
Also the category needs to be set up the same on both sonarr and uTorrent, but I don’t use that torrent client so I can’t help with that.
Pretty much every time I hear this, it’s a rights issue, at least in those cases where Sonarr grabbed a download and pushed it to the client but can’t process it. Can the Sonarr user actually access and write to the “Completed” folder?
Category? In UTorrent? Could you elaborate on that?
Well both the Completed folder and my “TV Shows” folder (that Sonarr already uses) have the same owners, but Completed is at 777 and TV Shows is at 755. So if anything, the COmpleted folder is more open than the Shows folder.
I hope someone that uses uTorrent can chime in, on how to set it up. I don’t even know if you explicitly need to define a category in uTorrent or not. I know it’s called a label in some other clients.
The idea is that sonarr will send torrents to uTorrent with this category (e.g. “tv-sonarr” is the default I believe), and will then only ask uTorrent “what’s the status for all tv-sonarr torrents?” rather than “what’s the status for all torrents?”.
This avoids sonarr trying to import all other things you may be torrenting.
Aha, there is a tv-sonarr label in UTorrent. I didn’t add it so Sonarr must have done so automagically. However download handling is still not working at all. Another new show episode came down last night and again… it’s just sitting in my Completed Downloads folder.
What about the folder structure above the Completed folder? If it’s in /path/to/Completed and the Sonarr user can’t access /path/to, it can’t access /path/to/Completed either.