AquaTube

A music and video player that looks like an object, not a window.

AquaTube is a translucent pod sitting on your desktop: a Frutiger Aero glass shell, a screen with the full cathode-ray treatment (curvature, scanlines, phosphor persistence, grain), bubbles drifting inside the shell, and a glow that breathes with the music.

All-glass aqua chrome: a dropdown menu unfolds from a discreet button in the corner of the pod (no bar to weigh down the silhouette), with the equalizer and CRT settings in floating dialog boxes. Everything works with the mouse (keyboard shortcuts are there for those who prefer them).

Underneath, a real player:

• Audio mp3 / flac / wav / ogg / m4a / aac, play queue with shuffle and repeat, adjustable crossfade (X key), synced lyrics (.lrc)
• Video mp4 / mkv / mov / webm (H.264 and HEVC), NVIDIA hardware decoding, .srt subtitles, fullscreen "cathode-ray TV" mode
• Library: scan your folders, browse tracks / albums / artists, search, sort, star your favorites, build playlists (.m3u import / export)
• 10-band equalizer, FFT visualizers (bars, oscilloscope, radial, area), album art
• 6 shell themes: Sky & Grass, Sunset, Deep Aqua, Vaporwave, Frost, Cyber (T key)
• Windows integration: keyboard media keys, volume overlay, lock screen, system-tray icon (music keeps playing with the window closed)

Portable: unzip, run AquaTube.exe. No installation, no network connection, no telemetry. Your data stays with you.

Press H in the app for the full list of shortcuts.

---

Requirements: Windows 10/11 64-bit, DirectX 12-capable GPU (hardware video decoding needs an NVIDIA card; otherwise software decoding kicks in automatically).

AquaTube uses FFmpeg (ffmpeg.org) under the LGPL v3 license, via replaceable dynamic DLLs (BtbN win64-lgpl-shared build). The license text ships inside the archive.

A 7Sail Studio tool. More of what we make: 7sailstudio.itch.io — mathieuferran.com/aquatube