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Best media player for windows 3.1 ?

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First post, by Robbbert

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I'm looking for a media player for windows 3.1 - it must be able to play WAV and MP3 at least, while WMA and others would be nice to have. Must also be able to play MP3 that contains metadata.

Google search, including its AI say to use media player 5.2, but they and many other sites have obviously never tested it, because it only supports 3 unknown formats from a long-derelict stream provider. Doesn't support any of the usual formats so it's entirely useless.

I saw a link to winamp on another thread, but there's no info of what windows versions it supports, just says "windows".

What would you guys recommend? win32s is installed.

Reply 1 of 2, by Jo22

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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.

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Reply 2 of 2, by rmay635703

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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.

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