WinPlay3 was the first

real-time Real-time or real time describes various operations in computing or other processes that must guarantee response times within a specified time (deadline), usually a relatively short time. A real-time process is generally one that happens in defined ...

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...

audio player for PCs running

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

, both 16-bit (Windows 3.1) and 32-bit (Windows 95). Prior to this, audio compressed with MP3 had to be decompressed prior to listening. It was released by

Fraunhofer IIS The Fraunhofer Society (german: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e.V., lit=Fraunhofer Society for the Advancement of Applied Research) is a German research organization with 76institutes spread throughout Germany ...

("Institute for Integrated Circuits"), creators of the

format, on September 9, 1995. The latest version was released on May 23, 1997. Since then, the Fraunhofer Society has removed any trace and mention of WinPlay3 from their web sites. However, the software remains available by utilizing the Web Archive, or one of the links below."1995: (...) In the same year, Fraunhofer provides a first PC based Layer 3 codec as shareware."— The program became popular thanks to the

warez scene The Warez scene, often referred to as The Scene, is a worldwide, underground, organized network of pirate groups specializing in obtaining and illegally releasing digital media for free before their official sale date. The Scene distributes all fo ...

. The first

warez Warez is a common computing and broader cultural term referring to pirated software (i.e. illegally copied, often after deactivation of anti-piracy measures) that is distributed via the Internet. Warez is used most commonly as a noun, a plural ...

group to bring WinPlay3 to attention of a wider audience was

Compress Da Audio compress is a Unix shell compression program based on the LZW compression algorithm. Compared to more modern compression utilities such as gzip and bzip2, compress performs faster and with less memory usage, at the cost of a significantly l ...

. They released MP3 rips of CDs, with copies of WinPlay3 included, on several

FTP The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and data ...

-based warez sites.

Rabid Neurosis __NOTOC__ Rabid Neurosis (RNS) was an MP3 warez release organization which was founded in 1996, following in the footsteps of Compress 'Da Audio (CDA), the first MP3 piracy group. In 1999, the group claimed to have released over 6,000 titles a yea ...

emerged shortly afterwards, after which the scene exploded. Until the release of

Winamp Winamp is a media player for Microsoft Windows originally developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev by their company Nullsoft, which they later sold to AOL in 1999 for $80 million. It was then acquired by Radionomy in 2014. Sinc ...

in 1997, WinPlay3 was the sole option for playing MP3-compressed music on Microsoft Windows. Unlike modern audio programs, such as Winamp or

iTunes iTunes () is a software program that acts as a media player, media library, mobile device management utility, and the client app for the iTunes Store. Developed by Apple Inc., it is used to purchase, play, download, and organize digital mul ...

, it lacked advanced features such as equalizers, or

playlist A playlist is a list of video or audio files that can be played back on a media player either sequentially or in a shuffled order. In its most general form, an audio playlist is simply a list of songs, but sometimes a loop. The term has sever ...

s as a menu option, and concentrated mostly on playback. A

can be created by hand, however, in a simple

text file A text file (sometimes spelled textfile; an old alternative name is flatfile) is a kind of computer file that is structured as a sequence of lines of electronic text. A text file exists stored as data within a computer file system. In operating ...

listing the system

path A path is a route for physical travel – see Trail. Path or PATH may also refer to: Physical paths of different types * Bicycle path * Bridle path, used by people on horseback * Course (navigation), the intended path of a vehicle * Desire p ...

to each MP3 and saving the file with an

M3U M3U (''MP3 URL'' or Moving Picture Experts Group Audio Layer 3 Uniform Resource Locator in full) is a computer file format for a multimedia playlist. One common use of the M3U file format is creating a single-entry playlist file pointing to a st ...

extension. The m3u playlist support made it the first widely available media player application that offered a well-integrated streaming experience for the web user. Clicking a link on a webpage launched WinPlay3, which would start a stream of the mp3 listed in the m3u file. The limitations were most likely due to the requirement of a

486DX The Intel 486, officially named i486 and also known as 80486, is a microprocessor. It is a higher-performance follow-up to the Intel 386. The i486 was introduced in 1989. It represents the fourth generation of binary compatible CPUs following the ...

processor running at 66 MHz for real-time playback, which at the time was fairly high.

References

External links

FhG IIS WinPlay3
on Really Rare Wares (September 1995 through May 1997) (16- and 32-bit versions) {{DEFAULTSORT:Winplay3 Windows-only shareware Windows media players