The WinMX program housed a few built-in features such as bandwidth monitoring, short messaging, and hosting chatrooms and functions as an OpenNap client. For music albums this led to wrapping all the tracks into a single file. Note that only sharing of individual files was supported. Some considered WinMX to be much safer than many other file sharing software, mainly because no spyware or adware came with WinMX. Frontcode had operated several cache servers to aid WPNP network operation.ĭownloads could be very fast for popular songs since the user can run a 'multi-point download' that simultaneously downloads the same file in small pieces from several users.

WinMX began its life as an OpenNAP client capable of connecting to several servers simultaneously, although Frontcode later created a proprietary protocol, termed WinMX Peer Network Protocol ( WPNP), which was used starting with WinMX 2 in May 2001. Efforts are still under way to develop a new client that will be compatible with the old one, which is believed to no longer be affected by such WPNP specific network attacks. Many users of the WinMX software are still utilising the OpenNap functionality which remains unaffected by the attacks. In May 2011 the WinMX WPNP network came under attack causing WPNP network searches to return random results. In North America, WinMX has been eclipsed by other networks such as gnutella and eDonkey as well as to the BitTorrent file transfer protocol. Frontcode itself abandoned development of WinMX in September 2005, but a community of developers brought the service back online within a few days by releasing patches or new host files. According to one study, it was the number one source for online music in 2005 with an estimated 2.1 million users. WinMX (Windows Music Exchange) was a freeware peer-to-peer file sharing program authored by Frontcode Technologies that ran on Microsoft Windows operating systems of the time, created in 2000.

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