How should quality profiles be configured for an author with Media Type = Both?

[yarafie]

I'm trying to understand the intended way to configure quality profiles when an author is set to Media Type = Both.

My goal is to acquire both an ebook and an audiobook for each book when available, but I want different quality preferences and cutoffs for the two media types:

Ebook:
PDF → MOBI → AZW3 → EPUB
Cutoff: EPUB

Audiobook:
OGG → MP3 → FLAC → M4A → M4B
Cutoff: M4B

I currently have separate E-Book and Audiobook quality profiles configured this way.

However, an author can only have one quality_profile_id, even when their media type is Both.

I understand that #2307 / #2314 changed the quality check so that a profile containing formats for only one media type no longer blocks releases of the other media type. For example, assigning my E-Book profile to a Both author should not prevent audiobook releases from being grabbed.

But that seems to leave the other media type without its own quality preference/cutoff.

I also considered creating one combined profile:

PDF → MOBI → AZW3 → EPUB → OGG → MP3 → FLAC → M4A → M4B

but a quality profile appears to have only one cutoff, so I don't see how that could express both EPUB as the ebook cutoff and M4B as the audiobook cutoff.

The factory Any profile (items=[], cutoff=any) also doesn't appear to solve this, since it effectively imposes no format-specific quality preferences.

What is the intended configuration for this use case?

Specifically, how should I configure an author so that Bindery will:

• acquire both ebook and audiobook when available;
• prefer PDF → MOBI → AZW3 → EPUB for ebooks and stop upgrading at EPUB; and
• prefer OGG → MP3 → FLAC → M4A → M4B for audiobooks and stop upgrading at M4B?

Is this currently possible, or would Bindery need separate ebook and audiobook quality profiles/cutoffs for authors using Media Type = Both?

If there is an existing supported configuration for this, I'd appreciate clarification on how it should be set up.

[vavallee]

Not currently possible, and your reading of it is exactly right at every step.

An author carries one quality profile, Author.QualityProfileID (internal/models/author.go:32), and a profile carries one cutoff, QualityProfile.Cutoff (internal/models/settings.go:56), a single string next to a flat Items list. So your three attempts fail for three different reasons and none of them is a misconfiguration on your part:

• The ebook profile on a Both author now grabs audiobooks fine after Manual media-type search still filters results against the book's stored quality profile #2307 and fix(decision): judge a release against its own media type in the quality profile (#2307) #2314, but leaves the audiobook side with no preference order and no cutoff.
• The combined profile expresses the ordering and then cannot express two cutoffs, because there is only one field.
• Any grabs everything and prefers nothing, as you say.

The thing that makes this worth fixing rather than working around: the author model already solves the identical problem for the other setting that needs per media type treatment. AudiobookRootFolderID (internal/models/author.go:39) overrides the destination for audiobook files while ebooks stay on the shared field. Quality has the same shape of problem and no equivalent field.

So the fix I want is AudiobookQualityProfileID on the author, nil meaning use the one profile for both, which keeps every existing install behaving exactly as it does now. Filed as #2333 with the reasoning, including why I do not want to make Cutoff per media type inside a single profile instead.

Until it lands, the least bad option depends on which side you care more about. Assign the audiobook profile if the M4B cutoff matters more, since ebooks will still be grabbed after #2314, just without a preference order. If you want ordering on both and can live without a real cutoff, the combined profile gives you that.

Thanks for working out that #2314 unblocked the grab without solving the preference. That distinction is what made this easy to answer.