A Foobar2000 alternative that runs everywhere
Foobar2000 got three things right that almost nothing else does at once, and stranded two of them on Windows. rox is the attempt to carry all three across.
What Foobar2000 got right
A UI you assemble out of panels instead of accepting whatever the developer shipped. A theme community on top of that, which is how CaTRoX, NekoRoX and Georgia exist at all. And tag and library management that doesn't fall over when the collection is tens of thousands of files deep.
Plenty of players do one. Very few do two. The stack that does all three has been effectively Windows-only for twenty years, and every attempt to move it has meant giving one of them up.
Where it leaves you
On Linux there's no official Foobar2000 build, so the honest options are Wine or something else. Wine works right up until it doesn't. A skin like CaTRoX leans on stacked workarounds and, in places, Internet Explorer rendering inside panels, and running that through a translation layer surfaces exactly how much is held together by luck. It's one OS update from breaking, every time.
macOS is better than it used to be, since Foobar2000 v2 ships a real Mac build. But the part people actually want, the component and skin ecosystem that made the Windows version worth configuring for a weekend, is Windows-side. You get the player without the reason you wanted the player.
And on Windows itself, nothing is wrong. That's worth saying plainly: if you're on Windows and your Foobar2000 setup works, rox is not an emergency.
What rox does about it
Native on all three platforms, one binary each, written in Rust on gpui. Forty panel types you arrange yourself, duplicate with independent configs, and pop out into real OS windows. The library scanner reads full tags, true durations and each file's own codec, sample rate and bit depth rather than skimming headers, and it holds up at 50,000 tracks.
The theming answer is the part that changed most. A workspace is a single file carrying layout, palette and appearance together. You edit it, you break it, you hand it to someone else and they get exactly what you had. One of the six in the box is a CaTRoX recreation, which is the honest statement of intent.
Side by side
| Area | Foobar2000 | rox |
|---|---|---|
| Native on Linux | No official build. Wine only. | First-class, x86_64. |
| Native on macOS | Official build since v2. | First-class, Apple Silicon. |
| Native on Windows | Its home. Twenty-plus years of it. | First-class, x86_64. |
| Panels you compose | Yes, through Columns UI and friends. | Forty panel types, built in, no components to install. |
| Sharing a look | A skin is components, configs and scripts. Famously fiddly. | One file carrying layout, palette and appearance. |
| Source available | Closed source freeware. | AGPL-3.0, all of it. |
| Component ecosystem | Two decades deep. Anything you can think of. | No plugin API. |
| Maturity | Since 2002. It does not surprise you. | Since 2026. It will, occasionally. |
| Footprint | Famously tiny. | One 62 MB binary, 134 MB resident at 50k tracks. |
Three rows go to Foobar2000, and they're the three that would take years to close. A comparison table where one column wins everything is an advert, not a comparison.
Who should not switch
If you're on Windows, your components are configured, and the setup has been stable for a decade, there is nothing here worth the disruption. If you depend on a specific Foobar2000 component, rox has no plugin API and can't replace it. If you want software that has already made all its mistakes, rox is four years too young.
If you moved to Linux and left the setup behind, or you're on a Mac holding a player without the ecosystem that justified it, that's the gap this was built in.
The other side of arriving late is worth stating. Nothing in rox has to stay compatible with a decision made in 2002, which is how a whole look ends up as one shareable file instead of a component graph, how one codebase covers all three platforms, and how forty panel types ship in the box rather than getting assembled one download at a time. It's also why track identity was never tied to file paths, which is the thing that makes merging a local library with anything else possible later. Most of that 62 MB is the same story.
Panels that pop out into real OS windows, or a palette that retints itself from whatever cover is playing, never made the table above. There was nothing to put in the other column. If differences like that are what you're after, rox is the place to be.
Try it against your own library
Free, open source under the AGPL, no account and no installer. Point it at the collection that breaks other players.
Or read the source first. That's a reasonable way to evaluate a player that wants your tag write access. Still weighing it up? The criteria that separate library players are written out separately, benchmarks included.