MediaAmp Pro

MediaAmp Pro

MediaAmp Pro is an Android media player developed by BS Planet. It plays music, video and podcasts in one app and one play queue; all three pass through the same audio processing chain, and each kind keeps its own resume point. The name is also written as Media Amp.

Audio processing

The audio chain is implemented module by module without an external engine and processes eleven stages in 32-bit floating point.

Declip -> MA Tone -> Tube -> Vinyl -> Tape -> 10-band EQ -> Space reverb -> Crossfeed -> Voice boost -> Studio Clear -> Limiter

• The 10-band equalizer follows the filter designs of the RBJ Audio EQ Cookbook. The range is 31Hz to 16kHz at ±12dB, with a simplified 5-band mode and support for pasting AutoEq headphone correction profiles. PEQ-10 draws a curve from band, gain and Q set by hand.
• Loudness normalization uses the ITU-R BS.1770-4 measurement. With album-level correction enabled, the relative loudness between tracks of an album is preserved. It starts off and is enabled in the sound settings.
• Declip restores waveform peaks cut off by clipping. It processes only segments where the improvement is certain, leaves ambiguous ones untouched, and starts off.
• MA Tone tidies the deepest bass so the low end sounds clearer, and its tilt leans the sound darker or brighter. The tilt only cuts and never raises a band. MA Tone starts off.
• Studio Clear and upscaling resynthesize the high frequencies lost to lossy compression around 128kbps from the harmonics of the remaining signal. Two textures, Crystal and Satin, are available; expert mode sets the strength by hand or sets it automatically from the codec and bitrate. Both start enabled on a fresh installation.
• Spatial effects consist of a Schroeder-Moorer reverb, 360° virtual surround, and crossfeed. The eight reverb presets are studio, living room, jazz club, concert hall, cathedral, cave, bathroom and outdoors, based on the decay times of real spaces. The reverb starts off with its preset values already loaded. Crossfeed has three steps, natural, standard and strong, and defaults to natural.
• Analog voicings are Tube, Vinyl and Tape. Each has its own intensity control, and their order in the chain is fixed.
• The limiter sits at the very end of the chain and catches overshoots caused by EQ boosts before the 16-bit conversion. Its ceiling is -0.3dBFS, dropping to -1.0dBTP only on the Bluetooth path, where lossy codecs raise the true peak. A TPDF dither is added on the way to 16 bits.

With every module off, the signal passes through unprocessed.

Sound console

The sound settings are laid out as a console with a signal-flow diagram and meters at the top. Two modes are offered, "Simple" for switching effects on and off and "Expert" for the detailed values, across seven tabs, and the recommended defaults can be restored at any time. The expert meters are true peak (dBTP), gain reduction, stereo width and processing latency.

The output analyzer measures the original and the processed signal at the same instant and reports headroom, clipping, dynamics, tone and stereo width against reference values. Turning off "Apply sound effects" returns the untouched original, so the two can be compared back to back. Each setting has a "How it works" screen that illustrates the waveform change.

The output path card shows whether audio is going to the device speaker, wired output, Bluetooth or USB audio, and lists the source and app output formats side by side. With the "Nearby devices" permission granted it also names the negotiated Bluetooth codec and the highest codec the device supports; if the permission is denied, only the codec line is hidden. "Recommended settings for this output" is applied and reverted in one action. Features the device does not support are not shown. A sound setup can also be bound to a single track through "Per-track sound settings".

Playback and control

In disc mode the album art acts as a jog wheel: one full turn is twelve steps, and 50 disc designs are available. Video carries the same jog wheel as a translucent ring over the picture, so a scene can be placed precisely even in full screen. The seek step moved by one notch is 5, 10, 20, 30 or 60 seconds, 5 by default, and the notification, headset buttons, widgets and jog wheel all use that one value. On podcasts with chapters, one notch snaps to a chapter.

Pressing the voice button and saying a title finds and plays it from the library; if there is no exact match, similar candidates are offered. The sleep timer can also be set by voice. Search supports Korean initial-consonant (chosung) input.

A-B section repeat, playback speed control, silence skipping and audio/video sync adjustment are included. The crossfade between tracks runs from 1 to 20 seconds and defaults to 12. Playback continues with the screen off or another app in front, and pauses for incoming calls, resuming when the call ends.

Library and media

A single playlist can hold music, video and podcasts together; video passes through the same audio chain and plays with subtitles. The library is browsed by track, album, artist, genre, composer, folder and audio quality. Quality groups files from lossless high-resolution down to standard lossy and narrows further by 16-bit and 24-bit, alongside format filters (MP3, FLAC, WAV, APE, M4A, MP4, MKV and others), selectable scan folders, and sorting by recently added, title, artist or rating. The chosen filters stay until they are cleared. FLAC and WAV play without conversion; APE is converted once to lossless FLAC the first time it plays, and that copy is what plays from then on. This conversion and extracting the audio of a video to MP3, M4A or FLAC are processed on the device.

Lyrics are shown in sync from tags embedded in the file or from .lrc files, and can be pasted in manually. A floating lyrics window stays on top of other apps. Lyrics are read only from the device, never fetched from the internet.

Podcasts are subscribed to by public RSS address, with pre-downloading, new-episode notifications, playback speed, resume, voice boost, and OPML import and export.

"Today's picks" on the home screen learns from play history, time of day, and the loudness and timbre of the files, all on the device, and states why each track was chosen. It also recognizes untagged files by their sound, and its criteria can be switched off individually or limited in number.

Interface

There are 100 spectrum meters. The meter starts off; tapping "Spectrum" in the player turns it on, and holding the meter and dragging it sideways picks a style. Besides instruments such as LED matrix, retro VU and aurora curtain, GPU shaders (Android 13 or later) draw physical phenomena: starlight bent around a black hole, an eclipse corona, Chladni figures on a vibrating sand plate, Cherenkov light and the thin-film colors of a soap bubble. The scenes lock to the kicks and snares of what is playing, swelling on a build-up and bursting on the drop, and the moon in "Ripple pool" is drawn with its phase and tilt at the current time by astronomical calculation. The analysis reads the end of the signal chain at the moment it is heard, in 27 bands, with a choice of weighting (ITU-R 468, A to D), analysis window, frequency axis (log, linear, Bark, Mel), display range and FFT size. Full-screen flashes are limited to three per second or fewer. Unfolding a foldable device produces a two-pane screen with the list on the left and the player on the right; folded, a mini player remains at the bottom. Tablets use the same two-pane layout.

There are five home screen widgets: playback, queue, and a resume widget for each of music, video and podcasts, with a choice of background and transparency. The resume widget shows the cover art together with the position left off, and the queue widget scrolls back through tracks already played. Themes combine light and dark with six accent colors (terracotta, emerald, sky, rose, violet, amber), and colors drawn from the album art carry into the screen. Tracks with no cover get artwork built from the mood of the song: one of 200 public-domain and CC0 photographs, drawn in one of 16 compositions such as rings, waveforms, spirals and hexagons. The same track always gets the same image. The interface is available in nine languages: Korean, English, Japanese, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Spanish, French, German and Portuguese.

Connectivity and data handling

Chromecast and DLNA send music and video to TVs and speakers on the same network, and formats the receiver cannot read are rewrapped before they are sent. The notification, lock screen, headset and Bluetooth buttons share the same playback controls. Starting playback automatically when a Bluetooth device connects has to be enabled in the settings. Deleted files are kept in a trash bin, and the settings are split into basic and advanced tabs with a search that jumps straight to an entry.

The app works without an account or login; play history, settings and playlists are stored on the device, and settings, playlists and favorites can be exported to a file and imported on another device. No ads interrupt use. A Google AdMob rewarded ad plays only where the user chooses it, and while it plays the advertising ID, IP address and device information are sent to Google. Consent is asked before the first playback. The app's privacy policy sets this out in detail. Not everything stays on the device, however: RSS requests for subscribed podcasts and the episode and artwork addresses those feeds point to, the device region code sent when opening the recommendation chart, voice recognition (handled by the recognition service installed on the device), and cast/DLNA traffic within the local network. The complete list is maintained in the app under Settings, Info & Terms, "Data sources", which is the authoritative record.

Distribution

The app is distributed through Google Play, which handles installation, updates, payment and refunds. It requires Android 11 (API 30) or later.

The music, videos and podcasts shown in the introduction screens are demo material produced by BS Planet. MediaAmp Pro provides no content and has no function for downloading music or video from the internet.