Nucube0.11 Release Cycle recap
Nucube 0.11 — SMB and NFS, played on the device
UPnP to a renderer was always the main path, and it already ran over the network. What lagged was the other half: a Samba or NFS library playing here, on the phone or the laptop.
0.11 is that half. 0.11.5 closes the release: a new playback layout, the library page folded into Audio, Italian as a full second language, and APE / WavPack in the scan.
Samba streaming to the local player was rebuilt from the ground up. NFS arrived as a full library source next to it. Shares on the LAN can be discovered instead of typed from memory. Scans are faster, can be cancelled, and tell you what failed. Cue-sheet albums on NFS and SMB are imported as albums, not as one giant file plus a sidecar. Category lists can play or enqueue when they hold tracks. APE and WavPack now scan from folders and shares — playback of those two is UPnP-only, for now.
That is the short version. The rest of this note is why those changes matter.
Recap
Local playback from SMB and NFSA single local HTTP bridge now serves both Samba and NFS to the on-device player. Same path on Linux, macOS, Windows, Android, and iOS. Faster start, fewer stalls, no special-case Android stack.
NFS, properlyConnect, pick an export, scan, play. Not a checkbox. The same library flow you already use for folders and Samba.
Find the shareAutomatic discovery lists Samba and NFS on the LAN. Pick one, or type an address if you already know it. The discovery page itself was laid out again in 0.11.5. IP resolve is less brittle than it used to be.
Scan like you mean itProgress shows the full pass. You can cancel a running scan. Failed imports can be retried on their own; errors copy in one go. Samba and NFS scan much faster than in 0.10. APE and WavPack are picked up from NFS, SMB, and local folders (DLNA already saw them).
Cue sheets on the shareA .cue plus one audio image, scanned directly from NFS or SMB, becomes an album with tracks.
Playback and AudioThe playback page has a new layout. Libraries and speaker now live together on Audio — one place for “what you play from” and “what you play to.” Play and enqueue work from category lists that contain tracks. Picking the speaker that is already selected no longer pauses the music.
LanguageThe app is fully internationalized. Italian is the second complete language.
The quieter workOfficial themes. Settings and Library stats redesigned. UPnP with several devices no longer loses the queue when you change speaker — and a phone that is only watching no longer hijacks the renderer. Stronger handling of UPnP play and skip errors. Hardware volume buttons on iPhone control Nucube. Linux AppImage sits next to deb, rpm, and Flatpak.
Current build: 0.11.5 (6 September 2026).
The part that took the time
Two ways to listen have always lived in Nucube.
One is UPnP: the app is the control point, a renderer on the network does the playing. That path was the original focus. It already moved audio over the LAN. It did not need this release to exist.
The other is local playback: the track plays on this device. Folders on disk were fine. Files sitting on a Samba or NFS share were not. Slow disks, flaky Wi-Fi, Android, a folder inside the share instead of the root, a metadata fetch that never came back. Each fix sat on top of the last one. 0.9 already made scans more reliable and started prefetching the next track. 0.11 throws that stack out.
There is now one local HTTP bridge for share audio. Samba and NFS both land on it. The on-device player talks to a local URL, the way it already talks to a file on disk. Prefetch, timeouts, and gapless do not need a second personality for “this came from the NAS.”
That is why Android playback from a share is no longer the awkward cousin of desktop playback. Same bridge. Same rules. The renderer path is unchanged.
NFS was the other half of the same job. Plenty of collectors keep the library on a Linux NAS and export it as NFS, not SMB. Asking them to wrap that export in Samba just so the phone can play it is the opposite of “your library stays where it is.” So 0.11 adds NFS as a library source: connect, choose the export, scan, listen on the device. Discovery sees both protocols on the LAN.
Cue sheets followed for the same reason. A lot of older rips — especially whole-CD images — live as one file and a .cue. If the player only understands a folder of tracks, those albums stay invisible until someone splits them. Direct scan on NFS and SMB means they show up as albums.
APE and WavPack are the same idea, with an honest limit. The scan now finds them on NFS, SMB, and local folders — DLNA already could. You can play them to a renderer over UPnP. Local playback on the device does not support those codecs yet. They sit in the library instead of disappearing until someone converts them.
None of this turns Nucube into a server. There is still no Nucube Core, no library you have to migrate into, no daemon you babysit. The files stay on the share. The app reads them — on the device, or still via UPnP if that is how you listen.
Around the player
Once local playback from shares was solid, the rest of 0.11 is the house getting tidier. 0.11.5 is the last pass on the rooms you actually stand in.
Playback page. The now-playing layout was rebuilt. Same job — cover, transport, where the sound is going — with less clutter between you and the track.
Audio, not Libraries. Sources and speaker used to live a click apart. They are one page now. The collection and the output belong in the same thought: this library, that renderer, or this device.
Discovery. The page that finds Samba and NFS on the LAN got the same treatment. Pick a share from the list, or type an address. Less chrome, same work.
Play from where you are. Category lists that hold tracks can play or enqueue directly. No extra trip through the album if you already know what you want.
Themes. nucube-light is the default light look. Two official dark themes — blue and green — ship with the app. The point is a coherent face, not a theme store.
Italian. The strings went through a full i18n pass. English is still the default. Italian is complete. Other locales can follow without another rewrite of the app.
UPnP manners. Switching renderer keeps queue and position. A phone used only as a remote no longer steals the renderer from the system that was already playing. Selecting the speaker you are already on no longer pauses playback. Play and skip errors from the renderer are handled more firmly. The protocol was not the project this time; the manners were.
Platform details that should have been boring. iPhone volume buttons control Nucube. Linux AppImage is a first-class download on GitHub Releases. Desktop apps already update themselves from 0.9; that path is unchanged.
Scan manners. Cancel. Retry only the failures. Copy every error at once. Deleting a library does the right thing when the same tracks still exist in another one. These are not features you demo. They are the difference between trusting a rescan and postponing it.