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.

After some weeks trying out this beautiful piece of software I think its time to make a review.

This software is full, and i mean FULL of functionalities. I'm not going to talk about them in detail, since other people already done that.

I have a 5.1 surround sound system and I like to ear the stereo music in all the speakers with surround "virtualization".

Media Player Classic used to be my go to music player and it worked ok. The surround mixing was done by the Realtek software and was good, until I tried AIMP.

The surround mixing is done by the app itself, and it does a way better job transforming stereo in surround compared to the sound card software.

it can do almost all audio thing i need

Highly customizable, lightweight, reliable and great-looking

Unrivaled in music playback there is no equal!

New gem beside winamp, clean UI and have better audio enhancement

Despite the Ubuntu-ish orange which can actually be changed to any color accent you want, AIMP’s minimalistic, fresh design—echoed on its Android version, is what drew me to it. I started it using it first on macOS/Wine where consistently feels faster-performing the native iTunes with its online features disabled (iTunes is as bloated on Macs as in Windows but it’s not slow, with the online feats disabled it’s even faster)

Something this gorgeous and media oriented felt too good to be true so I’ve monitored its network connections nonstop in every OS I’ve used but it doesn’t make unexpected connections or shows any other shady behavior.

The thing is featured-packed with so much sh*t going on ranging from Sound Blaster-like audio processing to youtube-dl to DLNA and still manages to remain zippy, it can dock itself to a side of any of your displays sliding over that display’s work area smoothly each time you summon it and, yes, on macOS/Wine. Also on Linux/Wine does it on a resource-constrained VM.

I doesn’t do video bc devs want to focus on audio, I read somewhere, so kudos on their strong principles. Unlike iTunes, AIMP can monitor your filesystem to clean or grow its library automatically. It also supports the stds-based WebDAV Internet filesystem protocol, the only one that lets you safely make multiple connections as well as opening files without transferring them first without risking corruption to your storage server. (there’s support but…) You don’t know longer need public clouds and their permission-demanding, vendor-locking-in apps, this is huge.
The only downside for me it that I wish it had an easier way to play albums. Search is a little confusing and you can't just click the album name value of a random track/title/song on screen to be taken into album view like you would in iTunes/Spotify/etc. It's a little more complex; actually a lot more complex: if you didn't find an exact match on the multiple search fields for the album groups as a single alphabet letter with other albums, then you have to navigate to it some other way so it's into view (by “it’s” I mean its songs) and draw (the tracks) from the library which it functions more like a raw repository of data since you don't play tracks directly from it but from what you drag out of it to the playlist. Not quite the same as iTunes' Now Playing because that's more like a mirror of what's playing directly from the library that lets you reorder tracks, impossible to do in the library only in playlists. Album view is the last feature AIMP needs to be perfect, for me that is. It's still pretty stellar as it is. :)