Astra 0.5.0 Beta

Astra 0.5.0 Beta by Razvan Serea Astra is an audiophile music player designed for local music libraries, supporting MP3, FLAC, WAV, AAC, OGG, M4A, OPUS, WMA, AIFF, and more via FFmpeg. It offers gapless playback with pre-buffering, multichannel audio remapping, and Dolby Atmos decoding, ensuring albums play seamlessly while maintaining high-fidelity sound. Astra features real-time DSP visualizers powered by a native C++ engine, including an oscilloscope, spectrum analyzer, and vectorscope. A fully parametric 10-band EQ with live frequency response, built-in presets, and AutoEQ headphone calibration import lets you precisely shape your sound. Playback controls include shuffle, repeat, and drag-and-drop queue management, while the library automatically extracts metadata, album artwork, and supports global search, favorites, and recently played tracking. Additional features include output device selection, delay calibration, customizable themes, fullscreen and mini-player modes, Discord Rich Presence, optional Last.fm scrobbling, and an opt-in local API for integrations. Astra delivers a complete, high-quality desktop audio experience with no telemetry, accounts, or streaming. Astra 0.5.0 Beta changelog: Added Highly experimental native bit-perfect playback with platform-specific backends: CoreAudio on macOS, WASAPI Exclusive on Windows, and ALSA hardware output on Linux. Remote library support for Subsonic / Navidrome and Jellyfin, including source setup, connection testing, sync status, and library integration. Built-in lyrics support with embedded lyrics reading, optional LRCLIB fallback, synced lyrics display, and fullscreen/transport lyrics views. Lyrics tools in the Metadata Editor, including manual lyrics import, manual lyrics clearing, and per-track sync offset adjustment. Optional Last.fm integration for Now Playing updates and scrobbling. Folder view in Library for browsing music by directory, plus folder-level playlist creation and add-to-playlist actions. Playlist custom cover art support. Playlist sorting and saved custom track ordering for regular playlists. Artist browsing options for Album Artist aware grouping and alphabetical album ordering. Optional Added Date column and sorting for tracklists. Dedicated quick launch mode for opening supported audio files with Astra directly from the OS through file associations. Improved Queue behavior and queue interactions, including drag and drop insertion flow and clearer Play Next / Add to Queue behavior. Library management UX and general browsing polish. Cover art loading reliability and lazy-loading performance. Window persistence across sessions. Scroll position persistence. Packaging and release handling across Linux, Windows, and macOS. Fixed Partial cover art loading issues on certain opus files. Subfolder and folder-handling edge cases. A range of UI issues across fullscreen, queue, and library views. Security issues around file access validation, SQL handling, randomness, and audited dependencies. Download: Astra 0.5.0 Beta | 141.0 MB (Open Source) View: Astra Home Page | Screenshot Get alerted to all of our Software updates on Twitter at @NeowinSoftware