AMP

You don’t need to be online to enjoy all of your favorite songs or clips, and the Internet wasn’t always so easy to access, or so smooth. There’s still the need for a dedicated desktop application to play all your multimedia files, and AMP tries to make it to the top, with a simple design and bold approach on entertainment.

Poor first impression

When the main window is brought up, you might end up scratching your head for a while. The interface won’t make a winner in any kind of beauty contest, but this doesn’t make it difficult to use. A side panel is used to store and show you all files loaded and that are up next, controls at the bottom, as well as a preview area for videos.
Sooner or later in the process you want to add some files to see how the application reads and plays them. Sadly, you can’t just drag them over the main window, even if they’re of the same type and format. You need to use the browse dialog in the upper toolbar, or the playlist context menu.

Far from being a pro

As soon as the open dialog is brought up, disappointment starts to kick in. This is because file range is pretty strict, and you can only load MP3, WAV, WMV, WMA, and AVI. As a consequence, you won’t get to enjoy better quality stored in other formats like FLAC or OGG.
What’s more, various other functionality issues keep you from fully enjoying songs or clips. In the event that the file you load plays, it might break the whole application when trying to pause or stop, as well as jumping to other files, for which there’s no built-in option.

To sum it up

Bottom line is that in the age where it only takes a few seconds to jump online for multimedia content, desktop applications need solid sets of features to convince individuals, and it’s a thing AMP is far from doing. Starting from the incredibly poor file support to frustrating functionality issues, we can say that you’re better off even with Windows default features.