CaTRoX, without Windows underneath it
rox ships a CaTRoX workspace in the box. This is the page about why, and about the people whose work it's standing on.
What CaTRoX was
A dense, dark, information-first layout for foobar2000: cover art rendered as a CD, a metadata field list down one side, album-grouped tracks with rating dots, and a menubar exactly where a menubar goes. It's the thing people mean when they say foobar2000 can look good, and it's most of the reason anyone put up with configuring foobar2000 in the first place.
It was never a skin in the sense a music player usually means. CaTRoX is a stack of components, panel scripts and configuration, assembled. That's what made it powerful, and it's also what makes it hard to move, hard to share, and easy to break.
Where NekoRoX came in
rox's author ran a fork of it for years. NekoRoX was CaTRoX with a pile of custom panels, plugins and quality-of-life modules on top: tree and filter navigation, mini and micro player modes, a synced lyric panel, a cover flow, Discord presence, last.fm tools. It has a note at the top of its README now saying it's no longer maintained, and pointing here.
The reason for that note is the honest content of this page. Moving to Linux full time meant running the whole assembly through Wine, and a stack held together by stacked workarounds, in places rendering Internet Explorer inside panels, does not take kindly to a translation layer. It ran. It also felt one update away from stopping, permanently, with a decade of configuration inside it.
The recreation
The CaTRoX workspace in rox is that layout rebuilt out of native panels: the circular cover render, the metadata field list, the album-grouped track list with its rating dots, the menubar. It's a look, reproduced, not a port of anything. None of CaTRoX's code exists in rox and none of it could, since rox is Rust on gpui and CaTRoX is panel scripts running inside foobar2000. The wider argument with foobar2000, including the rows where it's still ahead, is on its own page.
The part that changed is what it takes to have it. In rox a whole look is a single file holding layout, palette and appearance together, so the CaTRoX workspace is one click on the welcome window, and the thing you build from it is one file you can hand to someone else. No component list, no install order, no configuration that only reassembles on the machine it was built on.
What you don't get back
- Not every CaTRoX panel has an equivalent. rox has forty panel types and they're not the same forty.
- No YouTube playback. CaTRoX and NekoRoX both had it through components; rox plays what's on your disk.
- No plugin API, so anything you'd have solved with a foobar2000 component has to already exist in rox or not exist at all.
- It's a recreation working from the outside. Details differ, and a pixel-exact match was never the goal.
What you get instead is a layout that opens on Linux and macOS without Wine anywhere near it, survives an OS update, and travels as one file. After a decade of maintaining the original, that trade is the entire reason rox exists.
Try it
The CaTRoX workspace ships in the box, one click away on the welcome window. Five others do too, including a Foobar layout and a WinAmp-shaped one.