Design notes - Nuvo Docs

Conventions Nuvo shares with other music players

Music players have settled on a few layouts because they work. Nuvo uses them on purpose.

A navigation rail on the left with Home, Search and Library.
A transport bar at the bottom: cover, title, play, previous, next, seek line, volume, queue.
Covers in a grid for albums and playlists, and rows for tracks.
A full-screen lyrics view with the current line highlighted and scrolling in time.
A queue panel, a search field with a results page, and a context menu on every track.
A settings page split into sections.

You will find your way around Nuvo if you have used any modern player. That is the point of keeping these.

What was built for Nuvo

These parts have their own design and their own code in this repository.

A local daemon as the data layer. A Rust service nuvo-core owns the library in an encrypted SQLCipher database. The window talks to it over a unix socket with a per-launch token. There is no Nuvo server and no Nuvo account.
A recovery phrase. The master key lives in the system keyring and maps to a 24-word phrase that restores the library.
An encrypted audio cache. Audio is stored in 64 KiB sealed chunks, so seeking works without decrypting the whole file.
The Notch. A small island at the top of the screen with the current track, live lyrics and controls, placed per desktop session.
The equalizer. Ten bands on one curve over a live spectrum, with presets, auto gain and per-track memory of the curve.
Playback tools. Crossfade with a gapless fallback, loudness normalization, tempo and pitch presets with reverb, sleep timer, A-B loop.
Share links. A song or playlist becomes one compact link that carries the track list. The receiver’s Nuvo rebuilds it locally.
Paste anything. Search accepts links from several services and turns them into tracks or an import preview.
Local recommendations. Mixes and radio are ranked on your machine from your plays, likes and “Not interested” choices.
Themes. Nine presets, a colour editor with contrast warnings, theme files, and a custom CSS box with a strict checker and an appearance safe mode.
Local files. Watched folders, tag and cover reading, and moved files that keep their likes.
A network check. Per-host DNS, TCP and HTTPS rows, the proxy, clock skew and tool status in one report.
The icon set and the interface text. The icons are drawn on one 24 px grid from the sources in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES. Interface text exists in English and Russian.

Where to read more

Features: start at the introduction
How it is built: the architecture overview
Licence terms for the code and the third-party parts: licensing, THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES