Quality Profiles
A custom format test asks whether one release matches one format. A quality profile test asks a different question: when every custom format in a profile scores the same set of releases, do they come out in the order you want?
That question has no pass or fail. You don’t tell Profilarr what score a release should get. Instead you save the releases you care about, pick a profile, and read the scores. When you change a custom format or a score, you come back to the same releases and check the order still makes sense.
Think of a quality profile test as a search simulation. Instead of editing, syncing, and running an interactive search for every score change, you run the search once and keep its releases. Profilarr scores them against your latest changes straight away.
Adding Movies and Series
Rather than storing tests under each quality profile, Profilarr stores them under the movies and series whose releases you’re testing. Every profile in the database can score the same releases, so you can switch between profiles and see how each one ranks the same search.
Open Testing under Quality Profiles. Each linked database has its own tab. Press Add Entity (+), search TMDB for a movie or series, and select as many results as you like. Each one becomes a row you can add releases to.
Profilarr looks movies and series up on TMDB, so it needs a TMDB token before you can add any. Open Settings > General, and paste your API Read Access Token (not the API key) from your TMDB account into TMDB Configuration. Press Test to check it works.
Adding Releases
Each movie or series has two ways to add releases.
| Method | How it works |
|---|---|
| Import releases | Runs an interactive search in one of your Arr instances, the same search you'd run from Radarr or Sonarr, and lets you pick which results to keep. Choose the instance and the matching item in its library. For a series, you then choose a season, and Profilarr keeps only the season packs from that search. |
| Add release | Lets you type one in by hand: a release title, and optionally its size, languages, indexers, and flags. Use it for a release you've seen but can't find in a search right now, or one you've written to test a single format. |
Import releases searches from an item in your Radarr or Sonarr library, so add the movie or series there first. The search goes out to your indexers and can take a while. Each imported release keeps the size, indexers, languages, and flags its indexers reported, and near-identical releases are merged into one.
Search simulations double as documentation. Databases can publish them and users can see how its profiles rank real releases!
Simulating a Search
Start by choosing the profile you want to test from the profile menu (). When you expand a movie or series, Profilarr scores each of its releases in three steps:
- It runs the release title through the parser.
- It checks the parsed release against every custom format in the database.
- Each matched format is then added together to give a final score.
Here are the same four Blade Runner releases scored against two profiles:
1080p Quality HDR.A custom format is often scored by more than one profile, so changing it affects all of them. Since your test releases aren’t tied to a profile, you can make the change once, then switch between the profiles that use it and check how each one ranks the same releases.
Quick Parse
Press Quick Parse () to score a single title without saving it. Paste the title, choose whether it’s a movie or a series, and choose a profile. Profilarr shows the same breakdown as an expanded release. Use it to check a title you’ve just seen in Radarr or Sonarr before deciding whether it’s worth keeping as a test.