Ampere
Support & FAQ
Everything worth knowing before you download, and the things people hit afterwards. The product page is on the store.
Before you download
Is it really free?
Yes. It is listed 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.
What do I need to run it?
64-bit Windows 10 or 11. Nothing else — no VLC, no codec pack, no .NET runtime, no administrator rights.
What exactly do I get?
One portable Ampere.exe, about 148 MB. Almost all of that is
the libvlc decoding engine and a complete .NET runtime, which is what lets one
file run on a machine with nothing installed. If size matters to you,
Ampere 2 is 23 MB.
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.
Does it send anything anywhere?
No, and it cannot: every networking component is excluded from the build. No account, no licence check, no update ping, no analytics.
After you download
Windows says “Windows protected your PC”. Is something wrong?
No. That is SmartScreen. The executable is not code-signed, and an unsigned file has no download reputation with Microsoft until a great many people have run it. Click More info, then Run anyway.
If you would rather verify the file first, upload it to a service like VirusTotal and check it against the hash published with the download.
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 in your Gumroad library. Replace the old executable with the new one; your settings are kept.
A file will not play.
MIDI is deliberately not supported: it needs a soundfont to make any sound, and a track that appears to play in silence is worse than one the player never offered to open. Almost everything else — MP3, FLAC, AAC, OGG, Opus, WAV, WMA, APE, WavPack, DSD, Musepack and tracker modules — should.
Known limitations
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.
- The executable is not code-signed. SmartScreen will warn on first run. See above.
Still stuck?
Get in touch through Gumroad. Tell me what you were playing, what you expected and what happened instead. If there is an error message, include it exactly.