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.

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.