AIMP is short for Artem Izmaylov Media Player. It is a customizable music/audio player. Out of all the audio players I've tried so far, this is my fav.
It has various skins/themes in various styles or aesthetics, a bookmarks feature which is useful for audiobooks, & an audio converter but it only works with file types it can already read.
You can also customize the file type icons too. It's great for if you want to switch between various different design trends, especially since some of the skins are *gasp* transparent, including one that looks like the default Windows Media Player skin in the late 2000s.
I wish there were video players with aero glass skins. The closest seems to be VLC's transparency feature and that makes the video transparent too which is kinda annoying.
Overall I can't recommend it enough. Granted I'm not here to debate sound quality. (I know some audiophiles debate what audio player has the best sound quality, but I don't know if I'm a great judge of that.)
Everyone who's read my blog knows I love I2P. I know people associate the deep web (and related software like Tor) with unsavory activity & weirdos.
But I2P is not only useful for torrenting pirated media, it's also just fascinating in and of itself. Garlic routing is a peer to peer version of Tor's routing system, ie. it routes your traffic through multiple other users to make it harder to trace.
There's also a lot of indie web stuff on there, like personal blogs. There's some internet radio too but it's kinda laggy. Now my fav version of I2P is I2P+. Mostly for the router. It looks very sleek but skeuomorphic & detailed.
Plus there are a lot of links to useful things like mirrored news websites or an alternate frontend for pinterest called binternet.
Other neocities & nekoweb nerds have talked about their alternatives to spotify. I use other more conventional websites like bandcamp or funkwhale or youtube music on Freetube, & piracy sites.
I also use internet radio a lot too. It's good for when you want something in the background with no clear end or when you don't wanna choose a specific song. In fact I use it a lot when reading.
There are a lot of websites to choose from too. Want a site that's free with ads? Accuradio (although you can use ublock origin and it still works just fine).
Want something free with no ads? Soma FM. Want something focused on jazz? Jazz Radio. Want something focused on rock & metal? Epic Rock Radio.
Want something more retro? Poolsuite FM. Or shoutcast. Want something FOSS? Icecast. Want something with more anonymity? There's a bunch of internet radio sites on I2P too.
Plex is like a streaming swiss army knife. It's a legal freemium streaming service, a place for seeing what is streaming where, and software for media servers all in one.
Now it's not perfect. There are some privacy concerns. It uses ads for the stuff that's already on there. But they at least notified me & let me choose that they not sell my data.
Pluto won't even let me do that. Pluto instead tricks you into thinking you can select what cookies you get, but then they're all listed as "always active."
As for the "what's streaming where" thing, you can select what streaming services you wanna see results for in your account settings. I selected all free streaming services because why tf not.
So if you want an alternative to the search engine Just Watch, you can use Plex instead. There's also the fact that they provide custom media servers.
This means you can upload your own content to your own server provided you have the "plex media server" installed. And your friends can see it so long as you grant them access and they have the app. (Doesn't work inside the browser for some reason.)
Now I pirate things myself more than on my friend's plex server. Since with newer stuff, I care about video quality & lag. However I still use it and I am very thankful for it. Especially since my friend takes requests.
Of course, if you care about your privacy or if something's FOSS, you can always use Kodi or Jellyfin instead.