Note: before we continue, please note that we don’t condone piracy in any form, and you are responsible for your own actions.
Starting Up With Sonarr
Sonarr is a multi-platform app to search, download, and manage TV shows. It uses the torrent network as the source and is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac. Go to the download page to get the version and installation instructions that you need. Installers are available only for Windows and Mac, and this article is based on the Mac version, but since Sonarr uses the browser to display the interface, the look will more or less be the same regardless of the version that you use. In the Mac version there’s one more thing that users should do after installing Sonarr: enable remote access to the torrent client. The most typical torrent client for Mac is Transmission, and you can enable remote access in the Preferences. Go to the “Transmission -> Preferences” menu, and choose the “Remote” tab. Then check the “Enable remote access” box.
You can access the Sonarr interface by typing and opening “http://localhost:8989” (sans quotes) in your browser’s address bar.
Using Sonarr
After opening the Sonarr interface, the first thing that you will see is the “Series” tab. You can start managing the collection of your TV shows by adding new series to it.
Click the “Add Series” box, and type in the title that you want to add in the search box. After you get the result, you can customize the saving path, which episodes to watch, movie quality to download, series type, and whether you want to create season folders for the series or not. After that, click the green “Plus” button to add the series or the green Search button to add the series and find the missing episodes. The future episodes will appear automatically in your torrent client when they become available.
The added series will show up in the series tab. You can click on one of the titles to see more details about it. From the episode list, you can review missing episodes and add them to your collection.
You can remove a series from the list by clicking the “Edit” series icon and choosing “Delete.”
Managing Sonarr
That sums up the basic use of Sonarr: search and add TV series, and let it automatically download the latest episodes via your torrent client. You never have to deal with it again until you need to add more series or delete the ones that you don’t want to continue. But for the adventurous ones, the app has so many things to tinker with, and it would take forever to go through them one by one. For the sake of adventure, it would be more fun if you discovered them on your own. But there’s one more place that you need to visit often: the “System” tab.
You can install the latest updates from System. You can also check the status, tasks, backup, and logs. And most importantly, you can turn off or restart the app from here. If you are a TV freak, Sonarr is a convenient one-stop solution to managing the collection of your TV shows. Unfortunately, not all of the content that you can access via Sonarr is deemed legal in every country. Use the app at your own risk and always try to pursue the legal channels that are available from your location. Have you tried Sonarr? Do you use other similar alternatives? Please share using the comments below.
