Ampere — audio player for Windows
Drop a file. It plays.
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.
Small on purpose
No ribbon, no sidebar, no library to index.
Ampere is 330×128 pixels with its own chrome — no title bar borrowed from Windows, and 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.
Formats
Plays what you throw at it.
- MP3
- FLAC
- M4A
- AAC
- OGG
- Opus
- WAV
- WMA
- APE
- WavPack
- DSD
- Musepack
- .mod
- .xm
- .it
- .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.
When you want more
A playlist and an equalizer.
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. It is resizable
and remembers the size you left it. The equalizer is ten bands plus
a preamp, with built-in presets and a Custom entry the moment you move a slider.
Your defaults stay yours
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 — and it says so itself, in the Options window:
“This does not make Ampere your default player. Windows only allows you to set that yourself, in Settings. Nothing here replaces your current default.”
Everything it registers lives under your own user account, so nothing needs an administrator prompt, and the checkbox that turned it on turns it off again.
Privacy
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.
No account, no licence check, no update ping, no analytics. The only thing it writes
outside its own folder is your settings, as plain JSON at
%APPDATA%\Ampere\settings.json.
The honest bit
Why a small player is a big download.
The window is tiny; the file is not. Almost all of it is libvlc — the engine behind that long format list — plus a complete .NET runtime, so the executable runs on a machine with nothing installed on it. Video, subtitle, streaming and optical-disc components are stripped out, because an audio player does not need them.
The download is about 148 MB, and that is the whole of it — one file, nothing fetched afterwards.
Everything it does
The whole list.
- Compact 330×128 playerCustom chrome, drag anywhere, optional always-on-top
- Broad format supportMP3, FLAC, AAC, OGG, Opus, WAV, WMA, APE, WavPack, DSD, tracker modules
- No VLC neededThe decoding engine is inside the download
- Playlist drawerQueue, shuffle, repeat, drag-to-reorder, add a folder recursively
- M3U in and outOpen an existing playlist, save the one you built
- Ten-band equalizerPlus preamp, with built-in presets
- Explorer integrationPlay and Enqueue on the right-click menu, without changing your default player
- Single instanceA second launch hands its files to the player already running
- One portable fileNo installer, no runtime, no telemetry, no network access
Before you download
What it doesn’t do.
Deliberate omissions rather than things not got round to yet.
- The queue is not restored on exit. Close the player and the playlist is gone unless you saved it as an M3U first.
- No spectrum analyser. It would need the player to own the whole audio pipeline rather than hand decoding to libvlc.
- 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.
There is an Ampere 2
The same player rebuilt with its own audio engine: a 23 MB download, a faster start and full keyboard control. It drops the equalizer and some rarer formats, so this version stays available and the two run side by side.
Free
Put it on a USB stick. Run it anywhere.
£0+
Pay what you like, including nothing. Nothing is withheld or time-limited if you pay £0.
-
One portable
Ampere.exe, about 148 MB - No installer, no VLC, no codec pack
- No telemetry, and no network access at all
- Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit
Questions
Good to know.
Is it really free?
Yes. It is pay-what-you-want with a minimum of nothing, so you can take it for £0 without an argument, and nothing is withheld or time-limited if you do.
Why is a tiny player such a large download?
Because the decoding engine and a complete .NET runtime are inside the file. That is what buys you no installer, no VLC, no codec pack and no runtime to fetch first. If size matters to you, Ampere 2 is 23 MB.
Windows says “Windows protected your PC”.
That is SmartScreen. The executable is not code-signed, so Windows warns on first run. Click More info, then Run anyway.
Will it change my default music player?
No. It adds itself to Open with and adds Play and Enqueue to the right-click menu. Windows only lets you change a default in Settings yourself, and Ampere will not ask you to.
Where does it put things, and how do I remove it?
Settings go in %APPDATA%\Ampere\settings.json, and the right-click entries go under your own user account in the registry. Turn the file associations off in Options, delete that folder and delete the executable, and nothing is left behind.
How do updates work?
The player never checks for updates and never updates itself. New versions appear here. Replace the old executable with the new one; your settings are kept.
Ampere is original work, 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 — full component licences ship with the download in
THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.
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