NekoRoX, the foobar2000 theme, and where it went
NekoRoX was a foobar2000 theme: a fork of CaTRoX with a decade of panels, plugins and fixes piled on top. I maintained it as catlinman until it stopped being maintainable. rox is what I built instead, and its default look is that layout rebuilt from scratch.
NekoRoX running in foobar2000, on Windows, in 2022.
What NekoRoX was
A ready-made foobar2000 setup you unzipped into %appdata% and had a
finished player. Dark, dense, tabs for info, biography, lyrics, art and library, a
cover wall down one side, album-grouped tracks with rating dots, and an amber
waveform along the bottom with a spectrum under it. Underneath were Columns UI, a
pile of JScript panels, an .fcl layout file and a fonts folder you had
to install by hand.
It started as CaTRoX, eXtremeHunter1972's theme, later carried forward by TheQwertiest. NekoRoX added tree and filter navigation, mini player modes, a synced lyric panel, a cover flow, Discord presence and Last.fm tools, and merged a lot of TheQwertiest's work back in as it went. None of the underlying scripts were mine and the README has always said so.
AlphaRoX, the light one
Same theme with the palette inverted, published under this account as AlphaRoX. It's a fork of NekoRoX, which is a fork of CaTRoX, which tells you most of what was wrong with distributing a look this way. Same state as NekoRoX now: up, working, unmaintained.
Why it stopped
I moved to Linux full time, which meant the whole assembly went through Wine. It ran. It also rendered Internet Explorer inside panels, and a stack held together by stacked workarounds does not enjoy a translation layer. Every foobar2000 update, and every Wine update, was a coin flip on a decade of configuration.
The deeper problem was the format. A NekoRoX install isn't a file, it's a component list, an install order and a set of paths that only reassemble on the machine they were built on. That's why the README told people to copy four directories into two different places. Sharing a look shouldn't take a page of instructions.
What rox does with it
rox is a native player written in Rust, on Linux, macOS and Windows, with no foobar2000 and no Wine underneath it. Its default workspace is the NekoRoX layout rebuilt out of native panels, which is why the two shots look related. There's a CaTRoX workspace in the box too, along with four others.
The feature list, line by line
- Tree and filter based navigation Folder Tree panel, plus a cascading Filter panel over artist, album, genre and year.
- Mini and micro player modes One mini layout per workspace, toggled from the transport, with its own window size.
- Always on top Nothing yet. The window is a normal window.
- Rating and play count views Five-star or ten-point ratings, written to POPM and FMPS, and a sortable plays column.
- YouTube audio search and playback Nothing. rox plays files off your disk.
- Cover art viewer and cover flow A Cover Art panel and an Album Carousel that scales and dims its neighbours toward the edges.
- Real time synced lyrics LRC sheets highlighted on the playhead, click a line to seek, fetched from lrclib.
- Visualization and amplitude seek bar A whole-track waveform you can scrub, an FFT spectrum, a VU meter.
- Discord rich presence Now playing, play state and elapsed time over Discord IPC.
- Live biography lookup Artist biography with fanart, tags, listener counts and similar artists.
- Last.fm integration Scrobbling, now-playing, hearts mirrored as loves, and a loved-tracks import.
The thing NekoRoX couldn't do is the one I care about most. In rox a whole look is a single file carrying layout, palette and appearance together, so you hand someone a workspace and they have your setup. No component list, no install order, no fonts directory.
Get rox
Free, open source, one binary per platform. The workspaces page shows the six shipped looks, and the foobar2000 comparison covers where foobar2000 is still ahead.