WinMusic is a jukebox software developed by LLERRAH - Harrell backwards, as it was developed by Brenda Harrell. It is distributed with dozens of MIDI files of popular music as well as some original compositions by Margi Harrell (Brenda's sister, who also recorded all the songs).

The interface is so whimsical and colorful it passes right past garish and becomes endearing. Fortunately it is possible to turn off the animations, but then you lose access to the Icon Shooting Game (!?).

It runs on 16-bit Windows besides 32-bit versions of the OS, but I could not get it to work in 3.1 other than for a single MIDI file distributed with the program. It seems to run more smoothly on Windows 98 and XP.

Also, despite running on Win16, the program is distributed in an installer that requires Win32. To solve that problem, I repackaged the files into a Win16 installer that is just a self-extracting RAR archive. In this case you will lose the long file names of the MIDI files, but they would have been lost in Win 3.1 anyway.

According to the ReadMe file the program supports an impressive array of formats, including WAV, MIDI, MP3, AVI, MPEG, MOV, CD-Audio, AIFF and a few more. However it seems it requires external programs for media decoding - Windows Media Player and QuickTime - but I am not sure as documentation on how to integrate them is nonexistent.

In any case, I managed to track down the last versions of Windows Media Player for Win 3.11 (5.2 beta), as well as the last QuickTime (2.1.2) and made them available in this page. Maybe you will be luckier than me getting WinMusic to work.

WinMusic development ended in 2005 and it is no longer being sold, but despite being shareware it seems there are no limitations. The web page is still available.


Date: 2005-08-04
Version: 4.8
Interface: Graphical
Platform: Win16
Download: winmus48.exe - 904kB
Win16 installer: winmus.exe - 782kB

Date: 1998-07-03
Version: 5.2 beta
Interface: Graphical
Platform: Win16
Download: mp52beta.exe - 5.553kB

Date: 1996-08-27
Version: 2.1.2
Interface: Graphical
Platform: Win16
Download: QT16INST.EXE - 1.990kB