First look at AIMP 4.00

Martin Brinkmann
Aug 9, 2015
Updated • Aug 9, 2015
Music and Video
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28

AIMP is a popular audio player for the Windows operating system that ships with an impressive feature set and a plugin system to extend its functionality further.

The developers of the music player are working on the current stable version of the client and the next major version of it at the same time.

AIMP 4, currently available as a first beta release, ships with a new user interface that moves it away from looking like another Winamp clone on first sight.

The dimensions of the main application window have been expanded. It features main playback controls at the top, and below that access to local files, playlists and other functionality.

What you may notice right away is that the music library has been integrated into the main application whereas it was loaded as a separate window in previous versions.

The library that you used previously remains available after upgrading from version 3.x to AIMP 4. It is accessible right from the main window.

It may feel strange at first that the actual music that you are playing is listed on the right side of the interface and not front and center.

Music you play, and to a degree played, takes up about one third of the width of the interface while the remaining width is reserved for local files that you have added to AIMP.

If you don't use that feature, you end up with lots of wasted space in the interface especially since it is not possible currently to hide local files in AIMP 4. You may hide local files with the shortcut Ctrl-M.

The developers have added new functionality to the player as well. It supports the aften.exe command line encoder for AC3 formats now, multi tag values for APEv2, ID3v2, Vorbis Commens and M4A tags, and an option to limit the connection attempts when connecting to Internet radio stations when the connection is lost.

Downloads of AIMP 4 Beta 1 are provided on the official project website. You may install the version anew, upgrade an existing version of AIMP or install it as a portable version instead.

Summary
First look at AIMP 4.00
Article Name
First look at AIMP 4.00
Description
A first look at the recently released beta version 4 of the popular audio player AIMP.
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Comments

  1. moktata said on August 3, 2016 at 5:56 pm
    Reply

    I love the look and combined music library im using dark bliss. But there something off about the equalizer. i was using v3 and any time i have upgraded i notice the equalizer is not as good and the audio sound different. different in a bad way

  2. kevin lopez said on April 30, 2016 at 5:48 am
    Reply

    you guys can customize aimp 4 as you wish . have a look =>
    http://imgur.com/csAFm73
    http://imgur.com/CxiCjzL

  3. J7N said on February 12, 2016 at 1:36 pm
    Reply

    Until now the strength of AIMP has been pleasant visual design. I’ve actually enjoyed exploring the convoluted Settings dialogs, various layout options, and looking at the simple VU meters, while encountering fewer cosmetic glitches compared to other software. The GUI was fast, very solid, and fresh.

    The functionality for managing metadata has been and still is weak and *rigid*. AIMP is obviously not capable to be a tagger and replace either Foobar or Mp3tag. It is not possible to use any semi-standard fields not recognized by the developer (such as the date of reissue/remaster or the media type).

    I am pleased to see that *finally* multiple values per tag field are supported, which I asked for in the forums last year. This is a standard feature of Ape and Vorbis formats, and has worked in Foobar since the beginning. The implementation in AIMP is still rudimentary. AIMP will spit out a fugly string of “Bryan Adams;Rod Stewart;Sting” instead of using spaces, commas and ampersands where appropriate (as can be done with $meta_sep(), preferably with different color to indicate that the comma is not part of the artist’s proper name. Composers are also listed with semicolon and no space.

    AIMP will read in Ensemble tags from my FLAC files of classical music as if they were another value of Album Artist, which is inconsistent with the literal meaning of that field, and my usage of it to record the Orchestra. There doesn’t seem to be anything I can configure to change that, because the data is manipulated as Album Artist internally.

    I did not find the classic Pandemic skin “included” in the package. It only comes with white and dark “Bliss”. I had to go to the website and download Pandemic. As a new user, I probably wouldn’t know what to search for, and join the ranks of people who have seemingly preferred the new design.

    The TIFKAM-wannabe Flat Designâ„¢ is unpolished and difficult to read as expected. On Windows XP, in the very first dialog during Setup, most of the country flags, except Farsi, Ellnika, Kurdi, and Slovencina, were greyed out and barely visible against the faint grey background, without any logical reason for them to be “disabled”. The Settings window is rendered in a clashing mix of Tahoma and Arial fonts. (The former was preferable is the hand-hinted Win2K-style font.) Even with Pandemic skin selected, unskinned dialogs have ugly “flattened” appearance. There are some Win10 icons thrown here and there, where symbols consistend with the Pandemic style were before (file location, dropdown listboxes).

    I get an impression the designers were in a hurry to squish the life out of the GUI with a steamroller.

    I welcome the integration of the Media Library in the GUI. The location on the left side is logical, and also my preference in Foobar. It being called “Local Files” instead of either Database or Library does cause some confusion. Is the playlist on the Cloud then, if it is not Local? I wish the libary was more compact, leaving more space for the playlists.

    So AIMP is no longer a clone of Winamp. It is now a clone of a flat website inspired by Metroâ„¢. Good job.

  4. Hawk said on November 12, 2015 at 5:24 am
    Reply

    i love AIMP audio engine, feel so different and more powerfull with genius hs-g500v.

    1. Roman Podolyan said on November 12, 2015 at 1:54 pm
      Reply

      Technically speaking, AIMP is using BASS sound engine, free for non-commercial applications. I like it too :)

  5. webfork said on August 10, 2015 at 8:20 pm
    Reply

    The last time I tested AIMP over a year ago, I was concerned with the settings and customization menus being confusing and unintuitive. It looks like the main screen of course has been updated but what about the other menus and settings. Is it easy to navigate and tweak?

    As to the comparison of AIMP vs. Winamp that’s come up in the comments:

    * Portability – I appreciate that AIMP has made an ongoing effort here. Winamp isn’t very friendly on this side.
    * Company – if you just check out Winamp.com, you can see the software’s future is at best unclear.
    * Openness – both are closed-source freeware and could stop development tomorrow if the companies fail. Only Qmmp and Clementine are held up as open source Winamp alternatives (I wouldn’t include VLC as it doesn’t really have much of a library function).

  6. anohana said on August 10, 2015 at 7:00 pm
    Reply

    Please edit the article!

    You can use any theme, so no problem.

    But I like the new minimized form. :D

  7. Catalin George Festila said on August 10, 2015 at 4:41 pm
    Reply

    … old plugin for winamp !
    I don’t think about this plugin can do more features like a default player : vlc or maybe bsplayer…
    Also this plugin don’t impress me much !

  8. Bond said on August 9, 2015 at 4:43 pm
    Reply

    One reason that keeps me from switch to Aimp is that the equalizer presets seems weaker than Winamp ones.

    Does anyone know if i can import Winamp presets into AIMP?

  9. Roman Podolyan said on August 9, 2015 at 4:40 pm
    Reply

    For me AIMP is all good as it is with the functionality it has, and I see nothing attractive in the new interface so far. Well, may be don’t know something… Official AIMP site has “story behind” materials, explaining not only what is changed in the new version, but why it was changed as well (in Russian): http://www.aimp.ru/blogs/?p=575 Perhaps I should read that.

    Well, I use hotkeys, EQ, playlists, playback queue, Internet radio listening / recording occasionally. I hope they remain as they were.

    Those who cannot read Russian can read about all the changes in version 4 in English: http://www.aimp.ru/index.php?do=changelog&ver=400

  10. Hollister said on August 9, 2015 at 2:14 pm
    Reply

    Is there some way to see the lyrics of the song your are listening with AIMP?

    1. Pants said on August 9, 2015 at 8:16 pm
      Reply

      Depends what you need. You can either display embedded lyrics, or show lyrics on the fly by scraping the internet, or a combination where if there are no embedded lyrics, it will scrape them and stick them in for you for future proofing. (and then there are individual lyric files for karaoke or synced ones – I don’t know about these, I don’t use them).

      Personally, I don’t want my player touching ANY of my naming or id3 tags. I do not want it embedding ratings or play counts or anything. So I use LyricsFinder ( http://www.mediahuman.com/lyrics-finder/ : I extracted with universal extractor and it works as portable) to find and embed. I use Mp3Tag ( http://www.mp3tag.de/en/ – again, mine is portable) to display the unsynched lyrics tag which I can sort on, and also search for weird characters, and I can, one by one, clean up lyrics here if I want to). In WinAmp I use LeosLyrics plugin to display embedded lyrics (years ago it used to scrap for missing lyrics, but that functionality is long dead). LeosLyrics also allows me to edit lyrics on the fly – just edit and click save. I also use AudioShell ( http://www.softpointer.com/AudioShell.htm ) sometimes – I can find the file in Everything, right click, audio shell, edit tags which included a lyrics tab.

      Otherwise there are numerous third party utilities that can detect what any media player is playing, and display lyrics: CDArtDisplay was one (the site no longer exists but I have the files) – you create your own skins (kind of like rainmeter, so your desktop would show cover art and/or lyrics as you played music from itunes or winamp or whatever). It kind of helps having plenty of real estate – dual screen. There was another program I tried, can’t remember the exact name for it – AutoLyrics I think – which would scrape for any lyrics, but store them locally (under my docs/autolyrics?) for future plays (basically under a combination of artist & song title) – it didn’t use any embedded lyrics.

  11. 3M said on August 9, 2015 at 12:44 pm
    Reply

    But you can hide the Library (local files) from the Menu or by pressing Ctrl+M.

    1. JFP said on August 9, 2015 at 1:42 pm
      Reply

      Thanks a lot.

    2. Martin Brinkmann said on August 9, 2015 at 1:18 pm
      Reply

      Cool, thanks for that. I update the article

  12. anohana said on August 9, 2015 at 12:37 pm
    Reply
    1. Martin Brinkmann said on August 9, 2015 at 1:17 pm
      Reply

      Yes in some form.

  13. Nebulus said on August 9, 2015 at 12:30 pm
    Reply

    I switched to AIMP 3.x precisely because it looked like Winamp, so for me version 4 is not an option; I will have to stick to 3.60 for now.

    1. buzzard said on November 9, 2015 at 9:32 am
      Reply

      Get 4.00 bc you can still use older skins. I certainly am.

    2. John said on August 27, 2015 at 4:33 pm
      Reply

      3.6 looks way better than this. I have Element 3.0(All in one) theme, and the player is hidden on the right side of the screen. It’s just awesome.

    3. musique non stop said on August 15, 2015 at 2:00 pm
      Reply

      If you want a simple audio player, both AIMP and WinAmp are good options. But if you have a large music library and you want more control over it, MusicBee is a great alternative.

      I used AIMP for over 6 years. Frustrated by the limited options (especially with the limited now playing queue and finding specific songs fast), I switched at the beginning of 2015 to MusicBee and never looked back. It’s very stable, configurable, constantly improved, lightweight compared with how many features contains, and it handles well a large library. Plus, it’s free.

    4. DV said on August 9, 2015 at 7:19 pm
      Reply

      But… Why did you leave Winamp ? The latest version is still my default music player, I’ve tried a bunch of others but ultimately came back to Whipping the Llama’s ass ^^
      By the way, will give a go to the portable version of AIMP and see if it impresses me more than the last time I tried it.

      1. Guest said on August 10, 2015 at 6:19 pm
        Reply

        Well it crashed for me, so it’s ditched. It’s free? Since when? I recall having to pirate it. Having a look at wikipedia, it says it’s freemium: “but money (premium) is charged for proprietary features”. So looks like it’s not entirely free. Ok maybe it could be made portable, but I’d sooner support AIMP3 that’s out of the box portable.

      2. Pants said on August 9, 2015 at 10:42 pm
        Reply

        @Guest

        -WinAmp doesn’t crash for me (it hung once, about 5 years ago!)
        -WinAmp is free
        -WinAmp can also be made portable

      3. Guest said on August 9, 2015 at 10:29 pm
        Reply

        Well I also switched from Winamp to AIMP3. Three reasons:
        -AIMP3 doesn’t crash, unlike useless Winamp
        -AIMP3 is free
        -AIMP3 can run portable.

        Like Nebulus, I prefer AIMP to look exactly how it did in version 3. Can anyone confirm if there is an option to revert to this view in version 4? If not, then I’ll be sticking with version 3 indefinitely.

      4. Pants said on August 9, 2015 at 7:53 pm
        Reply

        Same here. I have tried around a dozen portable players – nothing comes close to the performance of my pimped out portable WinAmp (except foobar which I have not attempted as my main player), especially when it comes to handling my library size (my single library directory path will never change – its always a dedicated drive letter). I shall never lose my play statistics. And nothing else comes close to the features and customization of WinAmp (everyone’s needs are different).

        Plus, over the years I had kept a number of addons and skins, so even though the files are no longer on the site, I still have a kick-ass cover-art viewer (that cycles multiple images), a lyrics display (that also lets me edit lyrics on the fly), and a super-awesome skin (called Drone) which has hundreds of color schemes. Nothing beats whipping the llama!

    5. Steven said on August 9, 2015 at 4:41 pm
      Reply

      Don’t worry, AIMP4 will be skinnable like all previous versions.
      There is an AIMP 4 skin engine either on the way or available to testers somewhere in the forum.
      Check this link (in Russian) : http://www.aimp.ru/blogs/?p=575

      edit : I just installed the beta (as a portable) & saw in preferences it had the new skin (Bliss, shown above) & Pandemic. So I tried loading up older skins & it accepts v3 & v2 skins wihout any problems.

    6. Yuliya said on August 9, 2015 at 4:36 pm
      Reply

      Pandemic skin is included :)
      http://i.imgur.com/i5qTBhE.png

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