Automating Media Management with the Arr Stack

If you self-host a media server, you've probably spent more time than you'd like manually managing downloads. The Arr stack (Sonarr for TV, Radarr for movies, and the ecosystem around them) automates most of that. But getting it right takes some tuning.

The stack

My media automation runs on a dedicated VM: Sonarr (TV), Sonarr-anime (separate instance for anime with different indexers), Radarr (movies), Bazarr (subtitles), SABnzbd (Usenet downloads), qBittorrent (torrent downloads), and Jellyfin as the media server. Everything talks to everything through APIs.

Quality profiles

Most people either over-complicate this or leave the defaults alone, and the defaults grab garbage. I run a single quality profile per app that prioritizes Bluray remuxes, falls back to web-dl, and rejects anything below 720p. The key insight: set a quality cutoff so the system upgrades releases when better ones appear, then stops. Without this, it downloads the same movie five times.

The indexer question

Good indexers make or break the experience. I use a mix of Usenet indexers through SABnzbd and torrent indexers through Prowlarr (which syncs to both Sonarr and Radarr). The split means I get the speed and completion of Usenet for most content, with torrents as a fallback for niche releases.

Monitoring

I built an MCP server that exposes all the Arr APIs as tools. I can check queue status, fix stuck downloads, search for missing episodes, and manage quality profiles through natural language. It's overkill, but it means I rarely need to open the Sonarr web UI anymore.

Lessons from a year of automation

Let the system do its job. The biggest mistake is micromanaging downloads. Set your quality profiles, configure your indexers, and walk away. Check in weekly, not daily. The second lesson: monitor disk space. A 40TB NAS fills up faster than you think when every show is a Bluray remux.