A small Windows audio player, inspired by the compact players of the Winamp era. It plays almost anything you own, sits in the corner of your screen, and asks nothing of you. Free. Pay what you like, including nothing. Small on purpose Ampere is 330×128 pixels with its own chrome — no title bar borrowed from Windows, no ribbon, no sidebar, no library that wants to index your entire music collection before it will play one song. Drag it by any part of the window. Pin it above everything else if you want it visible while you work. Click the time readout to flip between elapsed and remaining, the way the players it descends from always did. Plays what you throw at it MP3, FLAC, M4A and AAC, OGG, Opus, WAV, WMA, APE, WavPack — and further out than most players go: DSD, Musepack, and tracker modules like .mod, .xm, .it and .s3m. That breadth comes from libvlc, which is built into the download. You do not need VLC installed, and you do not need a codec pack. Drag files or whole folders onto the window and they play. MIDI is the deliberate exception: it needs a soundfont to make any sound at all, and a track that appears to play in silence is a worse experience than one the player never offered to open. A playlist and an equalizer, when you want them One drawer slides out below the player, holding one panel at a time. The playlist takes files or a folder added recursively, reorders by dragging, shuffles, repeats, and reads and writes .m3u so your queue is portable. It is resizable and remembers the size you left it. The equalizer is ten bands plus a preamp, with built-in presets in a dropdown and a Custom entry the moment you move a slider yourself. It will not take over your file associations Free media players have a reputation here, and it is deserved. Ampere adds itself to Open with and puts Play and Enqueue on the right-click menu for audio files and folders. That is all it does. Your current default player is not changed. Everything it registers lives under your own user account, so nothing needs an administrator prompt, and removing it removes the entries. No telemetry, and no network at all Most software says it does not phone home. Ampere is built so that it cannot: every networking component is excluded from the build — HTTP, HTTPS, TLS, FTP, SFTP, SMB, RTP, UDP and TCP are all left out of the bundled media layer. There is no account, no licence check, no update ping and no analytics. The only thing it writes outside its own folder is your settings, as plain JSON in your user profile: volume, window position, shuffle and repeat state, drawer size, and your equalizer curve. Why a small player is a big download The window is tiny; the file is not. Almost all of it is libvlc — the decoding engine that handles that long format list — plus a complete .NET runtime, so the executable runs on a machine with nothing installed on it. That is the trade being made deliberately: one file you can copy anywhere, no installer, no runtime to fetch first, no codec pack, nothing left in your registry beyond the context-menu entries you can remove. Video, subtitle, streaming and optical-disc components are all stripped out, because an audio player does not need them. Everything it does Compact 330×128 player — custom chrome, drag anywhere, optional always-on-top Broad format support — MP3, FLAC, AAC, OGG, Opus, WAV, WMA, APE, WavPack, DSD, tracker modules No VLC needed — the decoding engine is inside the download Playlist drawer — queue, shuffle, repeat, drag-to-reorder, add a folder recursively M3U in and out — open an existing playlist, save the one you built Ten-band equalizer — plus preamp, with built-in presets Explorer integration — Play and Enqueue on the right-click menu, without changing your default player Single instance — a second launch hands its files to the player already running Drag and drop — files or whole folders, straight onto the window One portable file — no installer, no runtime, no telemetry, no network access What it doesn't do These are deliberate omissions rather than things not got round to yet, and it is better you know before you download than after. The queue is not restored on exit. Close the player and the playlist is gone unless you saved it as an M3U first. This is the one you will notice on day one. No spectrum analyser. It would need the player to own the whole audio pipeline rather than hand decoding to libvlc. The equalizer did not need that, which is why it exists and this does not. Right-click verbs live under Show more options on Windows 11. The top-level menu is only open to packaged apps, and packaging would end the copy-one-file-anywhere property. No global media keys, internet radio, album art, or classic skins. What you need Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit No .NET runtime — self-contained No VLC installation — the decoding engine is bundled No administrator rights The executable is not code-signed, so Windows SmartScreen will warn on first run: click More info, then Run anyway. If you would rather check first, the source is on GitHub and you can build it yourself. Licence Ampere is MIT licensed. It bundles LGPL components — libvlc, LibVLCSharp and TagLib# Ampere is original work. It is inspired by the compact players of the Winamp era; no artwork, skins or code from any other player are included or reproduced. Audio decoding is provided by libvlc from VideoLAN, used under the LGPL.