foobar2000 vs AIMP

Foobar2000 has a clean, minimalistic UI, small filesize, and is light on resource usage.

Foobar200 has over a hundred components to choose from that add UI functionality, decoding support for various formats, etc.

Foobar2000 natively supports MP1, MP2, MP3, MPC, AAC, WMA, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, ALAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, AU, SND, CD, Speex, Opus, and support for additional formats can be added with plugins.

Through the use of a plugin (of which there are three popular ones), users can get bit-exact sound output straight to their DAC or soundcard. While not something every user will use, for audiophiles this is a pretty important feature.

ReplayGain can be applied on a per album or track basis, allowing the user to set up an even volumed listening experience.

Foobar2000 provides an extensive search to look through your library. It supports special queries to only look for certain tags and other conditions and is incredibly fast in doing so even with over 20k of songs in your library.

The player has a layout-editing mode that allows for a wide variety of UI setups.

It was made in order to be as respectful to music as it can be.

Foobar works well with Windows Media Center IR remote controls with virtual mouse functions; also with wireless mini-keyboards.

It has one of the fastest monitoring abilities. Only couple of seconds passes between adding a file into monitored folder on external NAS and it appearing in the library.

Grouping files by folder structure is an important feature especially when files don't have proper tags.

Foobar 2000 has powerful theming support.

Browsing a site like DeviantArt will give you hundreds of skins (that have been made by other users) to choose from.

It has by far the best scanning of large music libraries containing couple of thousands of files.

Foobar2000 can natively play ASX/MMS/RTSP streams.

The converter component allows foobar2000 to convert from and to any file formats that the player is capable of playing back.

Includes dynamic range analysis, integrity checkers, equalizers, and visualizers, such as waveform, oscilloscope, spectrum, spectrogram (waterfall), peak and smoothed VU meters, and X-Y (Shpect Lissajous) displays.

I'm old enough to have a lot of music where whole albums are worth listening to. This is also essential when the composers created music where the flow from one song to the next is part of the art of the album. E.g. on Queen's ANight_at_the_Opera_, the first song -- Death_On_Two_Legs -- is a very hard rock song with very pissed off lyrics. The next is _Lazing_On_a_Sunday_Afternoon, which is a very lighthearted amusing song. The contrast is wonderful. Also many artists have one song flow into another and breaking them up by using random on a song basis really breaks the music. Plus shuffle prevents repeats until the entire playlist is done. If you want, you can select individual songs and the are shuffled as if they are the entire album. It's harder to describe than to do:
configure play mode to shuffle albums

If you're like me -- and I know I am:
add library to list
play

But you can be more selective:
select albums (or songs if you only like a few)
do {
play_the_shuffled_list(list);
if (mood("not in for the current"))
skip();
if (mood("change_the_list))
change_the_list(&list);
} while !shuffled_off("mortal_coil");
die("happy");

Users can easily send their music files to their MP3 device through the use of the right click menu when browsing their library.

AIMP supports a huge list of audio formats and several playlist types.

AIMP can play, manage, and filter music stored in the whole computer or specified folders. It is able to read metadata from music files' tags and perform real-time searching out of it.

AIMP updates using its built-in updater, so you don't have to visit AIMP's website and download the whole installer every time a new version is available.

Even with lots of skinning options, AIMP is lightweight and works on the smallest computer.

AIMP has an 18 band equalizer (which is manually customizable), plus 22 presets by default [user can add his/her custom presets]. It also includes a +15/-15 dB preamplification.

AIMP has many more features including: dither, anticlipping, customizable hotkeys/shortcuts, customizable player's user agent string, access to Favorites audio files and playlists, rating for tracks, tracklist export, optional temporary information bar with track info every time a track begins, volume normalization, ReplayGain support, volume fading between tracks, and more.

AIMP can be maximized, restored, sent to the tray, or switched to Mini Player for your convenience.

AIMP uses the BASS library, which provides one of the best audio quality of all currently available music players for Windows.

AIMP can manage multiple playlists by a tab system, similar to web browsers.

AIMP has two tools for further music management.

Tag Editor lets you add album art to audio files, fix metadata to individual files or to all files included in a folder, rename filenames, complete tags from filenames and viceversa, and more.

Audio Converter lets you convert an audio file into another format (for instance, from FLAC to M4A). You can choose quality parameters, renaming of files, and output paths for converted files. Audio conversion supports multiple core encoding, so if your CPU has four cores, you can convert audio using 1, 2, 3, or 4 cores.

Other music players usually require separate plugins for this, but AIMP comes by default with the modern WASAPI (Windows Audio Session API) audio output support thus providing purest sound output unadultered by the Windows mixer (in WASAPI Exclusive mode) out of the box.

Simple and good working ability to delete files right away from the player.

AIMP is available in 36 languages, including: Russian, English, Arabic, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish (Argentina), Spanish (Spain), French, German, Italian, Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan), and more.

AIMP has a scheduler which lets you stop playback, close the program, or turn off your computer at a specified time/period.

AIMP's seekbar features a waveform display of the entire audio file for easier navigation within the sound file. For example you can easily see where are the silences which is especially useful for podcasts and talked content.

The user can download icon sets for different audio formats.

AIMP can grab internet radios' audios and save them to drive, in real-time. You can save the streaming in its original format, or choose the codec manually [AAC, OGG Vorbis, OPUS, etc] and its bit rate. You can even save its CUE log and split files, if desired.

AIMP has a digital sound processor manager which lets you apply sound effects to the output audio in real-time. These effects include: echo, reverberation, Flanger, Chorus, bass, enhancer, speed, tempo, and pitch. It also has a voice remover feature for stereo audio files.

AIMP supports several plugins originally designed for WinAmp. However, it also supports new plugins designed for AIMP itself. From visual plugins to extra codec support, YouTube playlists playback, Soundcloud playback, or spectrum analysing, these are a selection of supported plugins.

Handsome design