Apps
Hear your music even wh en you’re surrounded by noise
The best apps for working and playing on your smartphone.
Many phones have equalisers, which let you boost certain areas of the audio spectrum to suit your headphones. You can raise the bass for a booming sound, or pull up the middle to hear vocals better. But equalisation, while nice, doesn’t solve a major problem with some music: fluctuations in audio levels.
While pop is generally mixed to rip through FM radio and sound as loud as possible, some tunes are designed to be dynamic. In a quiet environment, this rise and fall in volume can have a big impact, with subtleties surprising you and louder elements having impact, but when it’s noisy – if there’s tyre hum while driving, say, or you’re walking down a busy road – that effect can be detrimental. Clamp Audio Player aims to remedy this by applying dynamic processing to your tracks to bring those levels closer together.
It doesn’t flatten your tunes out, as such. Instead you’re given a simple pair of controls which let you adjust the sound to your liking – essentially you’re remastering the music in real time. It only works on MP3, AAC, Vorbis and 16-bit FLAC tunes – so no streaming services – but if you’re a commuter with a collection this could be essential.