There's WinPlay3 for MP3, but an early WinAmp might be Win32s compatible.
I think something like 0.99 or 1.50. Real Player 5 might run, too.
Info: https://www.winhistory-forum.net/thread/4434- … n3-1x-win32lie/

The beta of Media Player 5.2 can he found here: http://www.gaby.de/win3x/esoft.htm

Edit:

Must also be able to play MP3 that contains metadata.

That's tricky. There are two types of ID3-Tag. A file might contain just one or two, I think.
ID3v1 (30 chars) was attached to end of file, so it couldn't be used for streaming.
ID3v2 was attached to header of file, allowed for lyrics and a cover image.
Unfortunately, with WinPlay3 being the original player, it doesn't know about ID3v2 yet.

Use a dos player like mpxplay

Audio player MS-DOS/W3.11

mp3

open cubic player vs mpxplay

Winplay3 will barf on id3
Winplay3 MP3 bitrate and format?

Surprised nobody backported Media player classic 6.1 (the one with every codec known to man so you could play back dvds on vintage computers) so it would actually work on Win3.x or vintage NT 3.x
I always found it strange given its product scope that 9x was originally supported (remember I used it 2005+) but the older stuff was ignored

Coming at this another way there is software that will remove the id3 crap and possibly convert formats.

Tried a few things on my 386-based wfw.

Tried winplay3, it installed fine, but when i went to use it, it said it needed a 486 with FPU. Why didn't the installer say anything? So it was uninstalled.

Tried 2 versions of realplayer, not realising it's actually a video player which I don't need. First one wouldn't install, because it's actually a 32-bit version even though the download said 16-bit. Tried second one installed, everything is in French so guessed my way through. At the end, it wouldn't work without 256 colours, even though that's what is set up. The uninstaller didn't work, so I chopped it out manually.

Haven't tried winamp yet, that's the next thing.

While at gaby.de site, noticed a few other goodies, got 2 of them to work. One was a Word 97 viewer (official Microsoft), and the other a curious product called Calmira. It makes the desktop look like Windows 95, which it did, and there's a bunch of nice stuff with it. It's obvious the author spent a lot of time on it, but there's so much more that could have been done. Decided to keep it. The only thing so far that annoyed me is the time in the taskbar tray was 12-hour, where I prefer 24-hour. It's nice when you can right-click on something and get a response.

I'll try winplay3 on one of the Pentium installations the next time I fire one of them up.

It might not be too hard to port VLC to Windows 3.1 with Win32s.

If MP3 is the only thing you want then Winplay3 is it. Winamp doesn't work in 16-bit windows. Or you could decompress your MP3s with L3DEC.EXE (which was included with 'MP3 Maker' and probably some other software). The stock MPLAYER.EXE can play WAVs.

(BTW there is a win16 mod player called mod4win)

Winamp doesn't work in 16-bit windows.

Winamp 0.99 runs on Win32s. But there's no audio playback.
Winamp 1.55b allows selecting audio devices (WaveMapper, SB16 etc), but it crashes after preferences dialog..
Perhaps one of the many old versions is usable, who knows..

Edit:

Tried 2 versions of realplayer, not realising it's actually a video player which I don't need. First one wouldn't install, because it's actually a 32-bit version even though the download said 16-bit. Tried second one installed, everything is in French so guessed my way through. At the end, it wouldn't work without 256 colours, even though that's what is set up. The uninstaller didn't work, so I chopped it out manually.

I guess you're too young to know, but Real Player was famous in the 90s for web radio (Real Audio streams, *.ra).
It rivaled QuickTime Player and Winamp (with its ShoutCast service).
Another early audio format was Sun's *.au aka *.snd, and MP2 audio.

Anyway, I got both Real Player 4 and 5 running. But v5 (in German 😱) crashed on my MMX PC when opening files.
Version 4 ran fine and played the sample video, with sound.
(Note: Installers complained that drive D: wasn't ready. Pressed "cancel" with the space bar many times to proceed).

However, these old Real Players only play Real Media files (*.ra or *.rm or *.rv etc)..
So it's not quite useful here, I guess. 😟

Edited.