Over a month ago we launched the AIMP development survey. Now, as the flow of respondents has subsided, we are ready to post the results:

Answers to you questions

Porting to other operating systems

Linux

1. Not everyone knows, but there is an official Wine-based build of AIMP for Linux.
2. If you encounter a problem with AIMP in Wine, please post to this forum thread. We will either adapt the player to Wine, or we will make a patch and submit it to Wine.
3. A large portion of the AIMP code is optimized for Windows peculiarities. So it cannot be complied on Linux as-is. Over almost 20 years of the player’s development, we have repeatedly received requests (sometimes even demands) to release the source code so that the community could do the port. But this has already happened. The code of the basic library, without which nothing would start, has long been posted on github — you can use it and transfer it to Lazarus.

MacOS / iOS

We do not plan to port the application to Apple platforms. With all the sanctions, this doesn’t look meaningful or promising.

Interface

Rendering via CUDA

1. CUDA are only available for Nvidia GPUs
2. The player’s interface is not “heavy”. Engaging the GPU would not have any noticeable effect.

Support of SSE 3 and SSE 4.1 instructions

Could you please provide more details on this? What would this support help with? In what scenarios is the performance not satisfactory?

Tooltips style became different in 5.30

Use the following help section: “Did you know?” / “Hidden options.” There you can learn how to turn off the new style.

Interface parameters are reset after updating

This happens only if the skin markup changes — the markup is not compatible with the old configuration file. We try to change the skin as rarely as possible in minor releases, but sometimes we still have to do it.

New features

Using a spectrogram to check authenticity

This feature is already available through the Spectralyzer plug-in.

A good plug-in for YouTube

The existing plug-ins are “not good enough” because YouTube does not allow to use alternative apps for playing/downloading streams.

Integration with Telegram

Please clarify how you see this integration.

Built-in scrobbler for Last.fm (Android)

AIMP for Android works with any client for last.fm and other similar services — there is no need for a built-in scrobbler.

Mass file renaming

Mass file renaming is already implemented in AIMP for PC. See Main menu \ Utilities \ Tag editor.

Tag support from MusicBrainz or Discogs databases

Online database support is already implemented in the advanced AIMP tag editor for PC. (See Main menu \ Utilities \ Tag editor).

Song lyrics support

Both the PC and mobile versions support song lyrics. Song lyrics can be embedded in tags or presented as separate files in LRC/SRT formats. In the PC version, the text is displayed in the “Track information” window, which is opened from the Main menu. In the mobile version, you need to slide the panel with “Track information” to the side, and the text will be displayed in its place.

Online playback (Android)

Mobile AIMP already supports online playback — see an article on how to set this up.

Audio output

DSD output

AIMP works exclusively with PCM signals. We have no plans to support the output of other types of signals.

Remove the volume control in ASIO

Just set the volume to 100% and it will be excluded from the signal processing chain.

Direct audio output via external DAC (Android)

If you know how to implement this or you have a link to the technical documentation, we will be grateful for the hint.

VST support

VST2 support appeared in AIMP v5.30, which was released exactly at the end of 2023.

New format support

AC3 in the audio converter

AIMP already has this feature — please see the instructions on our forum.

AAC+

Unfortunately, there is no open legal codec that supports the AAC stream extension. AIMP plays AAC+ streams in AAC compatibility mode (essentially with at a lower bitrate).

ADX

It is already supported with the bass_adx  plug-in.

Exhale (M4A)

This dialect is already supported by the built-in features of the OS. In order for AIMP for PC to be able to use system codecs, you need to enable the following option in the program settings: “Allow the use of system decoders” (“Playback \ Conversion options”). In the mobile version, it is enabled by default.

DSD in WavPack

The DSD signal support in the WavPack container became available in AIMP v5.10. Make sure that you have the player’s up-to-date version.

MPTM

It is already supported by the aimp-openmpt plug-in.

WMA (Android)

Unfortunately, there is no official Windows Media codec for the Android platform. The only alternative is the reverse-engineered decoder inside FFmpeg. If you want to help us transfer it to AIMP,  please let us know.

Something else

Where did you get my e-mail?

The voting took place on the Google Forms platform. If you were logged in to Google, your account was automatically picked up by the platform and you voted on your behalf.

Why don’t you open the code? Are you hiding something?

We only hide our intellectual property. We absolutely do not want anyone to produce clones of the player or build their commercial solutions based on our code.

Why you release updates so often?

We trying to release bug fixes as quickly as possible, to prevent the bugs upset you.

32-bit is not cool, port the plug-ins!

Some of the plug-ins and visualizations were written by third-party developers — we don’t have their source code. Unfortunately, without the source code, it will not be possible to rewrite these plug-ins to 64-bit.

* * *

We would like to say a big thank you to all of you who took part in the survey!

Soon, we’ll run one more survey. It will be dedicated to implementation peculiarities of synchronization between players.