If Foobar2000 was made in the current year.
A desktop music player for people with large, carefully tagged local libraries. You build the panels yourself, and a theme is one file you can hand to someone else. Native on Linux, macOS and Windows.
Under a second to a window
rox ships as one binary and starts before you've let go of the mouse.
| Player | Window up | Fully loaded | Memory | Idle CPU |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| rox | 0.3 s | 2.3 s | 134 MB | 0.5% |
| Elisa | 0.7 s | never settles | 206 MB | 74% |
| fooyin | 0.3 s | 18 s | 364 MB | 0% |
| Quod Libet | - | 19 s | 384 MB | 0.2% |
| Strawberry | 0.3 s | 32 s | 434 MB | 0.8% |
| Museeks | - | 3 s | 436 MB | 0% |
| Tauon | 8.7 s | 12 s | 2.8 GB | 0% |
I measured all of these myself, on one machine (Ryzen 9 5950X, Linux/Wayland) with the same 50k-track library on an external SSD, every player through the same harness with its library loaded. Memory is PSS across the full process tree. "Loaded" is when CPU settles after launch; idle is a paused player with the window visible. DeaDBeeF would have sat at 44 MB and won on memory, but it never got a row: its MP3 parser segfaults partway through importing this library, every attempt. rox indexes all 50,000 tracks, including the truncated files that trip it.
What's in it
Panels you compose
Two dozen panel types, from library and queue to spectrum, waveform and VU. Arrange them how you want, duplicate one with its own config, pop it out into a real OS window.
A library that holds up
A parallel scanner reads full tags and true durations from every file, not a header skim. Folder watching survives renames, and files with unreadable tags get indexed by filename so nothing drops silently.
Tagging you can trust
A full editor with atomic writes and batch edits. Ratings live in the files themselves via FMPS and POPM. Tag and cover lookup through MusicBrainz, iTunes and Deezer.
Themes as shareable files
A workspace is one file carrying layout, palette and appearance. Palettes can tint from the playing album cover per window, going light or dark with the art.
Gapless playback
A single-stream engine with shuffle, repeat and play-next. It recovers when an audio device disappears, and media keys and now-playing work on all three platforms.
Lyrics and history
Synced and plain lyrics from sidecar files, tags or lrclib, with an editor that writes back where it read from. A full listen log drives the history panel, stats and Last.fm scrobbling.
Make it yours
Five workspaces ship in the box, one click away on the welcome window. Each one is a single file you can edit, break, and hand to someone else. See them all.