Amarra Play

Bought this to patch the deficiency of the Onkyo HF player which can’t currently handle MQA files. As such Amarra Play works fine in this respect but certainly doesn’t look as polished (in fact it looks darn right amateur) and it’s handling of album art is abyssmal. Most of the albums currently within the app do not display the album art despite it being embedded or as an accompanying file. Sound handling is decent but it lacks a polished appearance. UPDATE after two months - album art can easily corrupt and disappear. Cannot successfully play gapless tracks. Apparently this is a long standing issue going back years and they still haven’t fixed it. I am therefore downgrading to one star. For all but basic playback of hi-res audio files I cannot recommend this app.

Ok, the app is dated, clunky, horrific for adding music and desperately in need of updating. However, the codec support is excellent and when it works, in conjunction with an external DAC, produces excellent sound. Though you can thank the source files and external DAC for much of that. Sadly, and the reason for only one star. I loaded half a dozen albums - a mix of standard FLAC, High Res FLAC, DSD, DSF and MQA and everything was what I hoped for. Skip forward a couple of weeks to when I finally had the time to add more albums - around 30 of them. And the App just constantly crashed at each and every launch. No amount of reboots, uninstalling and reinstalling would fix this. It seems to be fine if you load albums then never again dare to add more. And this is on an iPhone 12 Pro Max running the latest iOS. Maybe it’s different if you use their desktop app, but they haven’t inspired confidence in me to shell out for that. If I could get this useless app refund I would in a heartbeat. I’d be glad to revisit the app if they fix the issues. Though as I’m uninstalling it, I probably won’t notice if they do.

Compared to other apps, such as the one from Onkyo, this app offers impressive sound quality when connecting an iPad/iPhone to an external DAC. This is both with regard to playing red book/highres sound files stored on the device and MQA files from Tidal. I like that there’s a native iPadOS version so that the screen orients properly when used in landscape mode. Also, I’ve found dragging and dropping music files on my Mac to the app when connected to be more reliable than other apps (such as the Onkyo app). The EQ works very well and I’m hoping Amarra will expand the list of supported headphones (such as the LCD-X and other widely used studio headphones). Tidal integration in terms of sound quality is excellent. However, integration in terms of UI could be improved. Searching for artists, for instance, doesn’t seem to work as well as searching for tracks or albums. I imagine work on the app will be ongoing and given the benefits to sound quality, I think the app is very much worth downloading.

This app is great if you want to listen to music in beautiful sound quality (with a good DAC, of course!): - for free you can listen to most of your Hi-Res music, only have to pay if you want MQA & some more EQ options; that is very good value; - if you have Amarra Luxe, you can use the app as a remote, and even stream your music onto your phone on the same network; - customer support is second to none: I mainly have experienced this with Amarra Luxe, but even in this app I have submitted bug reports, feature suggestions, and they were implemented within days. There are some things that need to improve and still be implemented: use the feedback function, and let the developers know. I for one think have found the app for Hi-Res playback both for iOS and macOS, from the same developers, whose the apps work together. Keep up the good work!

Can't believe the front this Dev has,99 bucks for this.,plus it doesn't works wow

and clunky too. Scrolling through music takes an age. There’s no alphabetical listing down the side of the app to help you quickly jump to an artist. Have the developers seen the competition? I like Amarra but it really needs a competent remote to make the best of it. This app isn’t it.

Worst remote app I have ever used very clunky looses connection and very slow to respond to track changes. Paid to up grade to Amarra Lux. Needs. Lot more work guys to compete with Itunes and JRiver Remote apps.

When it connects it’s fine, but too often it doesn’t. When are you updating to fix this??

Amarra would be all I need for my HiFi listening if this app worked. What really disappoints is that I spent quite a bit of extra cash to get a version of Amarra that had a remote control facility only to find out that the app most often will not open.

A shame this app is not reliable, keeps losing the connection to Amarra 4 and does not display the album cover correctly, please guys at sonic studio get it sorted as it lets your other products down