Quick start

Five minutes from a fresh install to music playing. If you have not installed Nastro yet, start with Installation.

1. Open some music

Start Nastro. The three panels open together: the player on the left with the equalizer below it, and the playlist to the right. The display says Nastro. Drop music here or press L to open files. There are several ways to bring in music:

Drop it. Drag files or whole folders from your file manager onto the Nastro window. They are added to the playlist, and folders are searched with all their subfolders.
Open files. Click the Open button of the player, press L or Ctrl O, and choose one or more files. They are added and the first one starts playing.
Add a folder. File, Add folder... (Ctrl Shift O), or the ADD button of the playlist.
The command line. nastro ~/Music/some-album adds the folder and starts playing it.

Nastro plays FLAC, MP3, Opus, Ogg Vorbis, WAV, AIFF and MPEG-4 audio, among others, see Playback.

2. Play

If nothing started by itself, double click a track in the playlist, or press the Play button. The display now shows the codec, bitrate and sample rate, the time, a spectrum and the name of the track.

The buttons under the seek bar are Previous, Play, Pause, Stop and Next. Space plays and pauses, Z and B go to the previous and next track.
Click the seek bar to jump within the track, or use ← and → to move 5 seconds.
The volume slider is next to the speaker icon, and ↑ and ↓ change it too. BAL is the balance.
SHUFFLE and REPEAT are in the bottom row. Tracks move on by themselves and without a gap between them.
Click the clock to show the time remaining, and click the spectrum to switch to the oscilloscope or turn it off.

3. Shape your playlist

Click a track to select it, Ctrl click to add to the selection, Shift click for a range. The REMOVE button and Delete take the selection out of the playlist, never off your disk.
The SORT button orders the playlist by title, artist, album, file name, path or length.
Type in Filter to find a track, for example part of an artist and part of a title.
The + next to the tabs adds a new playlist. Double click a tab to rename it. Playlists are saved on their own and come back next time.

The full list is in Playlists.

4. Try the equalizer

The equalizer panel is on and flat when you start, so it does not change the sound. Open PRESETS and pick Rock or Bass boost, or drag the ten band sliders yourself. RESET brings every slider back to 0 dB, and ON turns the whole equalizer off so you can compare. With AUTO on, Nastro chooses a preset from each track's genre tag. Read more in The equalizer.

5. Change the look

Open Options, Skin and pick Graphite, Porcelain or Nebula. If the panels are too small or too large, Options, Skin size offers 1x, 1.5x and 2x. To make your own skin, see Skins.

6. Arrange the panels

Drag the title bar of the player to move the whole window, and the title bars of the equalizer and the playlist to move those panels, which snap to each other like magnets. Hide the ones you do not need with the EQ and PL buttons, or collapse a panel to its title bar with its Collapse button. View, Layout has four ready-made arrangements. See The interface.

Where to go next

The interface: every part of the window.
Playback: what each button does, gapless playback, shuffle and repeat.
Keyboard shortcuts: drive Nastro without the mouse.
Settings: language, menu theme, clock and more.
Troubleshooting: if you hear nothing.

Found a mistake? Edit this page on GitHub or open an issue.