macOS
A native music player for macOS
Foobar2000 has a real Mac build now. What it doesn't have on the Mac is the reason people configured it on Windows.
The gap on the Mac specifically
Foobar2000 v2 ships an official macOS version, and this page isn't going to pretend it doesn't. The catch is that the component and skin ecosystem, the thing that made a Windows install worth a weekend of configuring, is Windows-side. On a Mac you get the player without the ecosystem that justified choosing it.
rox puts the composition and theming back: forty panel types arranged how you want, duplicated with their own configs, popped out into real windows, and a whole look stored as one shareable file. One of the six shipped workspaces is a CaTRoX recreation, which is a fair statement of what it's aiming at.
Installing it
Open the DMG and drag rox into Applications. Releases are code-signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized, so Gatekeeper lets it open without a right-click-open dance or a trip to the security pane.
It behaves like a Mac application
The menus live in the system menu bar where macOS expects them, not in a bar drawn inside the window. The green button does native fullscreen, and holding Option gets you zoom instead.
Closing the last window leaves rox in the dock rather than quitting, which is the platform convention and the macOS half of the quit-to-tray behaviour.
Exclusive output through CoreAudio
Exclusive mode drives the device through CoreAudio at the file's own rate, and reports what the hardware agreed to rather than what was requested. Useful mostly if you have a DAC worth the trouble, and off by default because taking a device away from the rest of the system should be a decision you made on purpose.
What it can't do on macOS
- Apple Silicon only. There is no Intel build, so an Intel Mac needs a source build.
- Building from source needs Xcode, nix or not: gpui compiles Metal shaders at build time and nix cannot ship Apple's Metal toolchain.
- No plugin API, so a specific Foobar2000 component has no equivalent here.
Menus where macOS puts them, forty panel types to arrange however you like, and six complete looks a click away on the welcome window. If configuring the player is the part you actually enjoy, that's what's here.
Point it at your library
Free and open source under the AGPL. No account, and nothing running in the background when it's closed.
More on what it looks like, the full Foobar2000 comparison, or what the exclusive output above is actually doing, under ReplayGain and bit-perfect. Same player on Linux and Windows.