What Are Custom Formats in TRaSH Guides and Why Do They Matter?

Custom Formats are reusable scoring rules in Radarr and Sonarr that rate a release on attributes beyond its quality tier — source, resolution, language, release group, and similar tags. TRaSH Guides publishes ready-made collections of these formats plus step-by-step import instructions, and pairs them with quality profiles so your server prefers the releases you actually want. They matter if you have ever found that "the right quality" still lets in releases you would rather avoid, or blocks ones you would rather keep.

How Custom Formats change what gets downloaded

Radarr and Sonarr already rank releases by quality (e.g., Bluray-1080p above WEB-DL-1080p). That ranking is coarse: two releases in the same quality tier can differ a lot in language, source, or release group. Custom Formats attach a score to those attributes, and your quality profile decides the minimum score a release must reach to be grabbed or upgraded to.

The practical effect is a two-layer decision:

1. Quality profile sets the allowed qualities and the score threshold.
2. Custom Formats supply the scores that push a release above or below that threshold.

For example, a profile might allow only 1080p WEB-DL and Bluray, with a minimum Custom Format score of 100. A release matching your preferred language and a trusted release group earns enough points to be grabbed; a same-quality release from an unwanted group scores below the threshold and is skipped. Without Custom Formats, both would look identical to the downloader.

What the guides actually provide

The site's structure shows the intended workflow rather than a single reference page:

• Collection of Custom Formats — the library of ready-made formats to import, organized for Radarr and Sonarr.
• How to import Custom Formats — the import procedure.
• How to Update Custom Formats — keeping imported formats current when the collection changes.
• How to set up Quality Profiles — combining profiles with format scores, with separate walkthroughs for Anime, French, and German setups.
• Tips — supporting tasks such as merging qualities, ordering quality sources, renaming folders, and setting up language Custom Formats.

The guides cover Radarr, Sonarr, Prowlarr, downloaders (NZBGet, SABnzbd, qBittorrent, Deluge, ruTorrent), file and folder structure including hardlinks, and Plex settings. Custom Formats sit at the center of the Radarr and Sonarr sections because they are what make quality profiles selective.

Why the emphasis on scoring instead of simple quality lists

A quality-only list cannot express preferences that cut across tiers. Language is the clearest case: a French or German user may want a specific language track regardless of whether the release is WEB-DL or Bluray. Release group is another: some groups consistently produce releases you trust, and others do not. Custom Formats let you encode those preferences once and apply them everywhere, instead of manually checking each download.

The trade-off is maintenance. Because scores live in your Radarr/Sonarr instance, changes to the shared collection do not reach you automatically — which is why the guides include an update procedure. If you import formats and never update them, your scoring drifts from the recommended setup over time.

When this approach fits — and when it does not

Start with the Getting Started section, then follow the Radarr or Sonarr How to set up Quality Profiles page for your language variant, importing the Custom Formats it references. Verify the result by checking that a known-good release clears your score threshold and a known-bad one does not. The most common snag is a profile whose minimum score is set without the matching formats imported, which silently blocks or admits the wrong releases.