MP3 to EXE is a shareware created by Oliver Buchjost with the goal of enabling MP3 (or MP2) files to be played stand-alone, with no need of a decoder or player. In fact, the player contains the MP3 file within itself.

The idea is to enable songs to be distributed with no concern whether the recipient will have an MP3 player installed (which was a valid concern in the late nineties. Certainly not a concern anymore for any modern operating system).

The converter allows a high customization level of the generated player, from visuals to features, and also allows previewing how the player is going to look once created. You can add a clickable URL to your website and set an expiration date for the song. There is even an option to split files to fit in floppy disks! By the way, the player stub adds about 200 to 250kB to the MP3 file size.

The MP3 decoder is based on a Delphi component called EldoS Sounds, which by its turn is based on mpg123, therefore decoding accuracy should be high.

For some reason I could not get the player to work on Windows 10 or XP (the converter works fine on these systems). The screenshot here was taken on a Windows NT 4 virtual machine, and even then, I could not get the volume sliders to work. So I tried a Win98 virtual machine and the volume control did work there, but the VU meter stopped working...

There is an alternative MP3 to EXE, by another author, which is much less featureful. It is available here.

The web site is gone but a mirror is available at the Internet Archive.


Date: 1999-06-21
Version: 2.6
Interface: Graphical
Platform: Win32
Download: mp3toexe.zip - 980kB