AIMP

AIMP is without question the best audio player I've ever used. I had been a devout Winamp user for as long as I can remember, having tried and failed to migrate to different players at different times, including Quintessential Player, foobar2000 and Spider Player. No single player satisfied my needs so I had two or three players installed at once, with AIMP being the latest addition. Now only AIMP is installed on my machine, because AIMP covers absolutely everything and it does it better than anything I've tried previously.

I'm writing this review about AIMP3 3.10 RC 2 build 1051, released just this month.

I won't write about every single feature of the software but the following is relevant to the functionality I personally found to be the most worthy of note.

Bookmarks

If you listen to audiobooks or podcasts and don't intend to listen to the entire thing in one sitting you can add a bookmark which, when activated later, will continue playing the track at the point where you left it. This - along with pretty much every other function of the player - can be assigned to a hotkey combination (global OR local). So, you can hit the hotkey combo you defined and then immediately move onto another track in your playlist, or switch to different playlist. Which brings me to the next point:

Tabbed Playlists

You can create numerous playlists and have them available on a tab bar, making the track lists contained therein one-click away. You can also configure the player to open a double-clicked audio file in a new tab/playlist, which is pretty handy when you just wanna listen to or check out a freshly downloaded audio file without having to mess around with your current playlist or create a new one manually.

Docking

This is my favourite feature of the player. You can choose to have the player docked to the edge of the screen, which isn't particularly groundbreaking, but you can have the player "hide" in the edge of the screen until you move your mouse to the edge in question. When the mouse hits the edge, a small icon appears below it (which prevents the player from interfering with unrelated edge-clicking!). No matter where you place the mouse on the screen edge the icon will appear about a centimetre below it. When you click the icon the player slides into view. Click outside the player and it slides back again.

Inline Search

One of the things which attracted to me to Spider Player was its in-line search bar, and when I discovered that AIMP had the same feature it was one more reason to ditch the former. The search bar lets you type the name of a song and it will immediately jump to it in the current playlist (it will begin to do so in real-time as you type). It includes an arrow icon which when clicked will jump to the next matching track if needed. Very handy feature.

AIMP supports pretty much any format you can imagine, it supports plugins and skinning, it has a full-featured library, it converts audio formats, it has a tag editor, it has a scheduler...I can't think of anything it doesn't have, in fact. The number of available plugins is pretty low and I'm guessing this is simply because there's little need to add anything to this already-robust software. Despite the vast plethora of support this player offers it's not "bloated". It's speedy, has a clean interface and is pretty friendly to system resources.

Oh yeah, and it's free.