It was released by Fraunhofer IIS ("Institute for Integrated Circuits"),[5] creators of the MP3 format, on September 9, 1995.

[7] The first warez group to bring WinPlay3 to attention of a wider audience was Compress Da Audio.

Unlike modern audio programs, such as Winamp or iTunes, it lacked advanced features such as equalizers, or playlists as a menu option, and concentrated mostly on playback.

The m3u playlist support made it the first widely available media player application that offered a well-integrated streaming experience for the web user.

[10] The limitations were most likely due to the requirement of a 486DX processor running at 66 MHz for real-time playback, which at the time was fairly high.