I’m not sure how many people will remember this, but back in the early 2000s, there was a plugin for Winamp called OctiMax. I’m not sure what exactly it did, but it made music sound so much better in my headphones. It’s the perfect complement to Winamp which I still use as my primary music player.
Winamp Plus OctiMax
Don’t make fun of my playlist! As you can see, the plugin has presets for different types of music and a slider for Bass and Drive. Drive increases the volume while Bass increases the low notes. I usually keep the Bass at the lowest setting because anything more than that is too much.
Unfortunately, the plugin is no longer available on the web. I have two different versions saved to my external hard drive and who knows, they may be the last copies in existence.
Two Versions Of Octimax
I’m using Winamp 5.666 and the plugin works just fine. I don’t know how I ‘d be able to listen to music through Winamp without it. I’m just curious if anyone else still uses Winamp and OctiMax or did at one time? Milkdrop is cool, but it doesn’t make music sound better!
Thoughts and Insanity From Jeff 
Octimax was originally developed by Leif Claesson who has since moved on, but is still pretty active in the audio processing scene.
If you’re on Windows 7 ( and below, I suggest checking out one of his more recent offerings, Breakaway Audio Enhancer. It works on the system level, meaning that all your audio will be affected, not just that which comes out of your media player. Unfortunately, its development has mostly staggered as Leif has shifted his attention to working on Omnia.9, which is marketed towards the professional broadcasting industry.
There’s a fully functional 30-day demo available at http://www.claessonedwards.com/
That’s incredible that someone would leave a comment on this post knowing what the heck I was talking about. Thanks for stopping by and providing more information into what the author of Octimax is up too.
Jeff, You are spot on about Octimax. It is designed to emulate an Orban Optimod FM broadcast compressor limiter that is arguably responsible for the sound many of us grew up listening to. My player looks exactly like yours (OK the playlist might be a bit different). The only other thing I could add is to try it on the QCD player. The QCD player has the hands down best gap killer out there. I have tried them all on my radio stream and it is absolutely amazing with the Octimax compressor.
Nice blog by the way!
I use octimax in tandem with Breakaway live. I really like it. Sometimes I use only breakaway with the preset of plutonium. All depends on my mood.
I use octymax in tandem with Breakaway live. I really like it. Sometimes I use only Breakaway with the preset of plutonium. All depends on my mood.
I use Omnia.9 on my radio station (www.mpxwebradio.com)
I’ve discovered another processor based on octimax with advanced parameters configuration, It’s the Optiloud processor, It can only run with MAXMSP Runtime since the standalone version is corrupted by Way Back Machine.
Have you been able to get Octimax to work with Windows past XP? I have the 1.51 version of the plugin and it refuses to install
I had it working on Windows 7, have not tried to install and use it on Windows 10.