WinPlay3 was developed by the creators of the MP3 standard - the Fraunhofer Institute. It was the first real-time MP3 player, before MP3 was, well, MP3.

It had few features - no playlists, no equalizer, no tagging support - but it did what it was meant to do. Among the options, you could define CPU class - pentium or 486 - and output frequency. While these configurations do not make much sense today, when it is hard to find computers with less than 1GHz of CPU clock, that was a very useful feature back in 1995 (when version 1.0 was released) since 486s were still common.

Most versions were distributed as shareware and required a registration fee of DM 75 (≈ US$ 50), but the downloads below are pre-registered or include a serial number. Only the last released version (2.3b5) was made freeware.

There are versions available for Win16 (Windows 3.x) and Win32. Fraunhofer also developed a Mac OS Classic version called MacPlay3.

After version 2.3b5 FhG stopped developing WinPlay3 - MP3 was on its way to becoming synonimous with compressed audio and they could leave development tasks to the myriad other players that were popping up. A mirror of the web page can still be visited at the Internet Archive.


Date: 1997-05-22
Version: 2.3b5
Interface: Graphical
Platform: Win32
Download: wp32v23b5.exe - 983kB

Date: 1997-05-22
Version: 2.3b5
Interface: Graphical
Platform: Win16
Download: wp3v23b5.exe - 807kB

Date: 1996-10-28
Version: 2.0
Interface: Graphical
Platform: Win16
Download: wp200.zip - 1.214kB

Date: 1996-03-05
Version: 1.40
Interface: Graphical
Platform: Win16
Download: wpv140.zip - 1.167kB

Date: 1995-12-22
Version: 1.30
Interface: Graphical
Platform: Win16
Download: wpv130.exe - 202kB

Date: 1995-09-07
Version: 1.0
Interface: Graphical
Platform: Win16
Download: wpv10.zip - 146kB