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AMR is what your phone uses — or used — when recording voice memos and sending audio messages via MMS. It's a speech codec, not a music codec: specifically designed to compress human voice at extremely low bitrates (4.75 to 12.2 kbps). At those bitrates, music sounds terrible, but speech remains intelligible.
The format was standardised by 3GPP and became the default voice codec for GSM and UMTS mobile networks. If you've ever received a voice message as an attachment on an older phone, it was probably an AMR file. The wideband variant (AMR-WB) offers better speech quality and is used in HD Voice calls.
Modern smartphones have mostly moved on to Opus or AAC for voice recordings, but AMR files persist in older phone backups, voice recorder archives, and mobile forensics. VLC plays them on any platform. For archival or sharing, convert to MP3 or M4A — the quality won't improve (you can't recover what the codec discarded), but the files will be more universally playable.