Signs & Forced Removal

Anime and many remuxes ship extra subtitle tracks that aren’t full dialogue:

• Signs — on-screen text only (shop names, captions, text messages).
• Forced — the handful of lines shown over foreign-language dialogue.
• Songs — opening/ending lyrics and karaoke.

If you watch with a full dialogue subtitle, these tracks are clutter — and on a large library they pile up across thousands of files. Signs & Forced Removal detects and removes them, for both external sidecars and embedded streams, at a level you choose.

Caution

This feature is off by default. Signs tracks are useful to dub-watchers (who want the signs but not the dialogue), so Sublarr never removes them unless you opt in. Removals always go to the Trash and stay recoverable.

Sublarr tells signs & songs tracks (only signs and lyrics, for watching the dub) apart from full dialogue subtitles and other forced ones since 1.19.0. AnimeTosho tracks are recognised by their name and the forced flag of the original release, and the interactive search marks them “S&S”. To download them instead of removing them, use the language profile option Prefer signs & songs.

A subtitle with far too few dialogue lines for the video (for example 7 sign lines in style “Default” for a 24-minute episode) is refused as the full subtitle, whatever its style names say. The check needs the video’s length and allows a few lines for a few minutes, so shorts are unaffected.

Removal levels

A single setting controls how aggressive the removal is:

Level	Removes
Off (default)	Nothing.
Signs	Signs-only tracks.
Signs + Forced	Signs and forced tracks.
Signs + Forced + Songs	Signs, forced, and songs/karaoke tracks.

The level applies uniformly to sidecars and embedded tracks.

How a track is classified

Detection is content-aware, not just a title match — a mislabelled or untitled signs track is still caught:

Signal	What it tells us
Disposition / title	The forced flag, or Signs / Forced / Songs in the track title.
Cue density	Signs and songs tracks are sparse — a handful of cues per minute — where a dialogue track is dense throughout.
Coverage	Signs cover a small fraction of the runtime; dialogue spans it.

The same classifier powers Dubtitle Detection — here it’s used to decide what to remove rather than what to keep.

Two places it runs

Retroactively — the signs_cleanup rule

A new (default-disabled) cleanup rule sweeps your existing library. Like every Cleanup operation it has a config card, a dry-run preview (up to 20 example tracks with the reason each was matched), and a Run Now button. Nothing is touched until you confirm.

Going forward — on extract

Whenever Sublarr extracts embedded subtitles, it purges the matching signs tracks in the same pass — so signs don’t re-accumulate every time a new episode is processed. This uses the same level you set for the cleanup rule.

Guardrails

Two rules are absolute, regardless of level:

• A full dialogue track is never removed — only tracks the classifier is confident are signs/forced/songs.
• The last remaining subtitle of any language is never removed, even if it looks like a signs track. You never end up with zero subtitles for a language because of this feature.

Everything removed goes to the trash and can be restored.

Configuration

Setting	Default	Values	Effect
Signs removal level	Off	Off / Signs / Signs + Forced / Signs + Forced + Songs	How aggressively signs/forced/songs tracks are removed, for both the cleanup rule and the on-extract purge.

Configure it under Settings → Cleanup.

Note

Removing foreign-language dialogue tracks (e.g. stray Italian/Korean tracks) is a separate feature — see the foreign-track rule in Cleanup. Signs & Forced Removal is about non-dialogue tracks within the languages you keep.