Link between Sonarr and Sabnzbd?

The link between Sonarr and sabnzbd is a total mystery to me as is who does what after a file is downloaded and extracted. My current setup uses Sickbeard and sabnzbd and setting it up is trivial, though I would love to switch to Sonarr in order to avoid the problems of a Sickbeard and Python.

SickBeard collects nzb files for shows you add and it takes care of putting them in the final destination. So you set up nzb index sites in SB, set where a show goes, quality, etc …

Sabnzbd takes care of downloading and extracting files corresponding to nzb files sent to it by SB. They are treated as a tv category ( which you set up) and use a sab2sickbeard.py script which is placed in a Scripts folder for sabnzbd.

For the life of me I don’t understand the link between Sonarr and sabnzbd and who does what. Is there a really simple explanation? I have read the guide but I still don’t understand how the two programs are linked, what script if any has to go into the category TV of sabnzbd, who does the renaming and moving of files, etc … I get the adding of shows, entering nzb sites, etc … Would someone please explain the link and how sabnzbd has to be set up to work with Sonarr and vice versa? This is for a Mac if that matters. The final home for files is a NAS.

Thank you,

ls

Sonarr talks to SAB via its API, it does this to send new files to it as well as to determine when a file is ready to be imported. There is no need for a post processing script in SAB for the category Sonarr is set to use.

If SAB and Sonarr are on the same machine then you don’t need to do anything after connecting Sonarr to SAB, if they’re on different machines you need to configure a remote path mapping to link the path that SAB reports as the final directory to one that Sonarr can reach.

Let us know if you need any more details.

Ok, thank you. I got it working with two small problems.

1- I imported my shows by pointing things to a folder on my NAS which holds them. Sonarr then added them in a neat way but I ran into problems with Sonarr downloading past episodes. I only wanted it to monitor the shows and grab unaired ( i.e future) episodes. If I stopped monitoring a show I felt that would stop that. I also saw no way of stopping queued downloads so I had to shut down for fear it would be grabbing stuff I had already seen and discarded.

2- SAB downloads and extracts TV shows to …/downloads/complete/tv . Sonarr was able to see these and rename and move them to the NAS just fine but then I ran into issues with the Drone Factory folder. I wanted to set that to the /complete/tv folder but that led to complaints from Sonarr. Everything is on the same computer at this point.

This is on a test computer. Once things work right I will replace SB on my main one. Just these two small issues and auto-starting NZBDrone are remaining. It’s a great program so I would really like this to work. I assume that moving settings from one Mac to another is possible so I don’t have to go through the complete setup again?

ls

Queued downloads? If you mean wanted those aren’t search for automatically: https://github.com/Sonarr/Sonarr/wiki/FAQ#how-does-nzbdrone-find-episodes

You can unmonitor them by season or episode, more info here: https://github.com/Sonarr/Sonarr/wiki/Monitoring-Series-and-Episodes

Set drone factory to something else and let Completed Download Handling (CDH) deal with the importing (its much better at it), use Drone Factory if CDH gets caught up or you need to import something not grabbed by Sonarr.

Yeah, not explicitly covered in this guide, but you can get the paths from the UI: GitHub - Sonarr/Sonarr: Smart PVR for newsgroup and bittorrent users.