Sonarr will 'upgrade' a file with multi-channel audio to one with stereo audio

[PlasmaCherub]

Personally, I regard this as a bug, since it causes data loss in normal operation.

Sonarr will quite happily overwrite a 720p video file with multi-channel audio with a 1080p video file with stereo audio.

I realize it’s not important for consumption on mobile devices, but if you’re watching on a home-theater setup, it most certainly is.

I can understand not wanting to try to crack the problem of scoring audio encodings to figure out what is an ‘upgrade’, but IMHO going from 5.1 to 2 channels is a significant loss of information, and Sonarr shouldn’t automatically replace a file with one that has fewer audio channels.

To me, that’s the crux of the issue, we don’t need a sophisticated subsystem to ‘score’ a DTS Master soundtrack higher than an AC3 one, or take bitrates into account. Just don’t decrease audio channel count (unless told to).

I have yet to find a way to leave Sonarr on ‘full auto’ that doesn’t risk losing a 5.1 mix for a stereo one.

If there were versions of the ‘quality’ categories that had ‘-stereo’ and ‘-multichannel’ suffixes, that would solve the problem, e.g. ‘hdtv-720p-multichannel’ could be ordered with a higher priority than ‘webdl-1080p-stereo’ in a profile.

Hope you’ll give this some consideration. Thanks for a great piece of software,

• Paul

[beardman]

Have you tried v3?

Between quality grouping and preferred words, it does a pretty good job of preventing this, if you get your groupings and words scores set up properly–and use indexers that play well with the scoring.

[PlasmaCherub]

No, I have not. I’m still running v2.0.0.5322

Honestly, there are too many ‘ifs’ in that statement for me to be comfortable relying on it. The last thing I need is something else that needs monitoring and tweaking to get to an 80% solution.

No doubt there are uses for the ‘preferred words’ functionality, but basing something like this on all files being consistently and accurately named is wishful thinking - frankly, given human nature, it’s a small miracle there’s as much consistency as there is.

I’ve seen other people’s posts on this topic before, and ‘preferred words’ was the suggestion every time. They rejected that solution for the same reasons - I don’t think it addresses the issue in a reliable, configuration-free way.