The Dashboard

The dashboard is Needle’s home screen. It adapts to what you’re doing — showing a library overview when idle and a now-playing view when music is playing.

Layout

The interface is split into three areas:

• Sidebar (left) — navigate your library by Tracks, Albums, Artists, and Playlists. Smart playlists are listed here too.
• Main area (centre) — the dashboard and all browsing views.
• Playback bar (bottom) — transport controls, seek, volume, output device selection, and format info for the currently playing track.

When nothing is playing

The idle dashboard shows:

• A time-of-day greeting with your library summary (track count, album count)
• Quick actions: Shuffle play and Add folder
• Recently added albums sorted by newest, with relative timestamps (Today, 3d ago, 2w ago…)
• From your library — recommendation rows built from your listening history and collection:
  • Most played
  • Recently played
  • Needs a first spin
  • Rediscover
  • From your top genre
• Featured albums and Top artists rows
• Quick picks — random tracks playable in one click

When no album art is available, the hero area uses bundled artwork as a backdrop so the dashboard always looks complete.

When something is playing

The hero area switches to a Now spinning view showing:

• Animated vinyl indicator
• Centre-label album art
• Album artwork stretched across the top dashboard band
• Track title, artist, and album

Hover to play

Album cards in Recently added and Featured, artist tiles, and the Quick picks Play all button all reveal a play button on hover.