14 DAY TRIAL // Software producers tend to bring in their creations features as varied and new as possible, but sometimes they just push further some limits, instead of adding new stuff to it. Nevertheless, this is a good tendency for it creates programs with extended capabilities, sometimes bundled with interesting features or abounding in potential.
I guess multimedia is one of the domains that represent the largest interest in both public and software development, because nowadays multimedia has "invaded" almost every remote corner of our lives: far beyond home entertainment, multimedia is now present in our cell phones, even wristwatches, in almost every moment of our working time, in buses and so on, hence a greater concern from those who produce multimedia applications for developing their creations one step further.
For multimedia players, especially for audio players, the producers started to build in certain features that are usually met in real-life objects. Be those things equalizers, more realistic buttons (and generally speaking, more realistic looks), small things usually forgotten by developers, they all work together to lift standards. I noticed that lately, audio players tend to have more settings, letting the advanced user rejoice a bit more, and allowing tweaking and configuring even in easy-modes.
MoreAmp is one of these audio players which are looking for their new place among the big ones by bringing a whole set of features forward. Unfortunately, it does not gain as much as hoped, because this beta version I tested failed to show me real functionality instead of bulging together so many on-off buttons. The intent was very good but the way it has been put to practical work is not.
The Looks & The Works
MoreAmp consists of three separate windows and this was the first thing that made me look carefully. When I started the program, they were all grouped in a very orderly manner, even though they had totally different sizes. Later I found out this was the default start-up way...the MoreAmp placed itself in the same position on my desktop after modifying that. Well, one thing that is not so good is that these 3 windows are not sticking to each other as anyone should have expected. They are just there, it's up to you which goes where.
The control buttons are really good-looking and their on/off visual status looks awesome. Too bad this was the only thing that offered such a pleasant view. The rest of the GUI is rather poor and it seems like it has been drawn in a big hurry. The moving cursors are almost round and an attempted 3D look can be seen; unfortunately a faint one.
All the text is very readable, but it adds nothing to a potential personal touch any software should have. A Windows native color scheme could have been completed at least with nicer cursors. Corresponding to different on/off switches, there are some circles, which are colored green when on and blue when off. Some have a red intermediary state, but still, everything looks as if designed rather for a beta's beta; I guess the interface elements were taken from a GUI-DevKit and that was all.
The three windows work as follows: the main for playback control, balance, preamp and generic settings, the second one for playlists and info regarding files in these lists and, finally, the third one which has a large 31-band professional-like EQ. This is, in fact, the thing the producers of MoreAmp have chosen to make it stand out of the crowd. Unfortunately, this professional-type EQ comes with just one preset: not that good for the inexperienced users who can't really tell the difference between a compressor and an EQ! Even if these 31 bands are close to what one might meet in a music studio, they aren't at all "reachable": most common users won't have the curiosity to experiment with all settings and this means these options are almost futile, especially when considering the lack of already-made presets.
Possibilities are expanded by other options such an EQ-zoom and offset, left and right curve shift and inversion. I needed time to see what was happening when all these are tweaked, but I am not so sure people who just want to listen to music would also spend their time on it.
A really nice thing is that under each major playback control button you can read its name, as well as the shortcut key, which helps the user get familiarized with the commands a lot quicker. As a general consideration on song loading, the only method that really worked was the drag and drop. I daresay MoreAmp has some bugs: I repeatedly tried to load different folders but I never managed to have an entire folder loaded up correctly. I really can't tell if this was a program-PC conflict (since I am not a programmer myself and no error message was displayed) but I repeat: I never saw the entire content of a folder loading OK.
Song info in the dedicated window is very complete though and it offers a lot of interesting data you usually don't see in other players. Size in bytes, stereo/mono/joint mode, bitrate and samplerate and generally speaking whatever you might need to know about a certain track.
Even though MoreAmp starts rather slow, the playback works fast and smooth. Still, I haven't got enough knowledge about how the playlist exactly works; one thing is sure: pressing Delete won't eliminate a song from the list. I kept on restarting the application each time I encountered a problem and this is why I am not so happy with the overall working-manner of MoreAmp.
The Good
One can set the mix between side and middle of each track, the L/R balance in reverse, L minus R and other various combinations of channels and even speakers. A good thing is that MoreAmp will play almost any kind of audio data, be that mp4 or FLAC.
The Bad
This may be the result of the beta-stage, but I noticed some serious mishaps in the inner workings of the MoreAmp. Should these problems be overcome and the general GUI-elements be redesigned, I am sure MoreAmp will have more adepts. And one more thing: make these windows stick to each other, please!
The Truth
If you happen to need an audio player loaded with a pro-rank 31-band EQ, then MoreAmp is just the thing you're looking for. If not, it most likely isn't.
To get a better idea on MoreAmp watch some screenshots I made during tests:
