VLC vs AIMP

VLC is licensed under the CC-SA v3.0+ and available on Windows, OSX, and Linux with source code available here.

VLC is an incredibly robust application but very simple on the surface. It makes playing music simple, yet still manages to give the user all the tools he/she wants in a music player.

Everything VLC needs to play media files is contained within which means no outside codecs are needed. This makes it one of the most hassle-free music players as it can play virtually anything as soon as it's installed.

Besides basic configurations, video player has an extensive amount of adjustable settings.

You organize your music into folders any way you want. Want to play an album? Drag and drop. No tags, no confusion, no fluff. Easy.

VLC includes keyboard shortcuts for most actions. The video player can be controlled with simple and customizable keyboard commands.

Yes. Lightest. Even better than the ones known to be light. Both when playing music, only a single song or when playing a video. Either in terms of Ram and Cpu. Compared with almost all, including the ones from Windows like mpc-hc .. or light ones from Linux like Alsa Player, Audacious, SmPlayer .

Blu-Ray playback support was added on July 13th, 2014. It allows playing back DRM-free Blu-Rays with the help of libbluray, libaacs and libbdplus.

Using sftp/ssh music (and videos) can be streamed from any server on the network to any device running VLC. VLC can also be used as a webcam for streaming and snapshots. Amazing all in one package

VLC has a large amount of extensions.

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.

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