Nostrum 3
Nostrum 3 is a music player featuring a modern UI and the highest quality playback possible. It supports a variety of audio formats and has options for ignored folders, exclusive and shared playback, and UI themes.
Notes
Nostrum 3 requires tagged music files. Most music is tagged by default. If your music isn't appearing or isn't named correctly, tag your music with an application such as MusicBrainz Picard.
The circular buttons on the top right of the window correspond to the usual controls: minimize, maximize, and exit.
Lists can be scrolled either by using scrollwheel or by clicking and dragging.
Right click on artist, album, track, or queue tiles for extra actions.
Nostrum 3 does not support embedded album art. Instead, for each track, the folder that the track is in and all its subfolders are searched. The first image file named "Cover" (case insensitive) is associated with the track. The supported image formats are PNG and JPG/JPEG.
Settings
Library Directory - The directory to search for music in.
Ignore Folder - Folders with this name will be ignored and the tracks within will not be added to the library.
Exclusive Mode - Allows Nostrum 3 to have full control of the soundcard. All other programs to be unable to play audio while Nostrum is playing in this mode. Nostrum will make the sound card's sample rate match the playing track's sample rate. This means no resampling has to be done by Nostrum and no mixing will be done by the OS, resulting in a untouched audio stream.
Dithering Mode - Determines which dithering algorithm will be used by Nostrum 3 when resampling tracks to match the audio card's sample rate. This has no effect when exclusive mode is enabled as no resampling is performed. Nostrum uses the SoX resampler internally, configured for the highest quality. Nostrum's default dithering mode is "Shibata".
Theme - The color theme for the GUI. You can create a custom theme by changing the hex color codes in the options below. To pick these colors, you can use a color picker such as htmlcolorcodes.com.
Supported Audio Formats
AA - Audible 2, 3, and 4
AAX - Audible Enhanced
AAC - Advanced Audio Coding
AIFF - Audio Interchange File Format
ALAC - Apple Lossless Audio Codec
APE - Monkey's Audio
FLAC - Free Lossless Audio Codec
MP4/M4A/M4P/M4B - MPEG-4 Part 14
MP3 - MPEG Audio Layer III
OGG/OGA - Ogg
OPUS - Opus
TTA - True Audio
WAV - Waveform Audio
WMA - Windows Media Audio
Changes from Nostrum 2
Nostrum 3 uses much of the same audio playback code as its predecessor Nostrum 2. However, the GUI and track loading are completely different. Nostrum 2 used a custom OpenGL GUI. Because of how time-consuming it is to make a complex GUI in plain OpenGL, it ended up being very simple design and most of the controls were bound to keys rather than the GUI. Nostrum 3 uses the Qt Quick GUI framework, enabling a fully-featured interface.
Nostrum 3 also uses FFMPEG for metadata reading, audio decoding, and resampling whereas Nostrum 2 used only the FLAC library for decoding and did not support resampling. This enables support for the wide variety of music formats listed above, options for both shared and exclusive playback, and a library structure based on tags rather than folders.