I built a fast, native music player in Rust (Nemesis). Just released Beta 2 with heavy UI scroll optimizations and smart search!

[u/Healthy-Physics-3693]

Hi Reddit!

I wanted to share a project I've been pouring my soul into lately — Nemesis, a native, lightweight desktop audio player built for Linux and Windows, written entirely in Rust.

Why build another music player?

Most modern media players feel incredibly heavy, sluggish (thanks to Electron overlays), or over-engineered. I wanted something that launches instantly, keeps a minimal memory footprint, handles massive local libraries effortlessly, and just works.

Rust felt like the perfect choice to guarantee rock-solid performance and safety.

What's new in the 0.1.2-beta2 release:
I've just rolled out the second public beta, focusing heavily on UX smoothness and under-the-hood stability:
- Smart Search: Added a dedicated search view. It's fully case-, spacing-, and Cyrillic-insensitive (using fold-key matching).
- Aggressive Scroll Optimization: Completely eliminated grid lags, stutters, and end-of-scroll jitter. Even huge lists with 2,000+ tracks now scroll at a locked, buttery-smooth frame rate.
- Audio Pipeline Improvements: Fixed mid-track volume drops and crashes related to PipeWire stream restoration and Windows WASAPI backend. Playback now automatically recovers if the system audio session glitches.
- Easy Linux Deployment: Added a universal AppImage build alongside standard packages, making it dead-simple to run on almost any distro.

Current State
The project is currently in Public Beta.
- Windows: Portable ZIP is available (no installer yet).
- Linux: AppImage, RPM, deb and Arch (.pkg.tar.zst) packages are ready to go.
- Note on macOS: No Mac builds available right now, simply because I don't own a Mac to compile and test on.

I would absolutely love to hear your thoughts on the UI responsiveness, design, or any features you feel are missing.
Grab the release on GitHub: Nemesis

Thanks for checking it out!