Audion (software)

Audion was a media player developed by Panic. It was originally a commercial (shareware) program, but with the dominance of Apple's iTunes, development was halted and it was released as freeware. It was retired on 11 November 2004.

Audion
Developer(s)Panic
Final release
3.0.2 / August 22, 2002 (2002-08-22)
Operating systemMac OS X, Mac OS 9
TypeAudio player
Websitedownload.panic.com/audion/

Design

One of the features of Audion that set it apart from its rivals, particularly SoundJam, was its user interface, which featured transparency through a process that mimicked the functionality of alpha channels on Mac OS 9's QuickDraw, a graphics system that did not support them.

History

Cabel Sasser has written that he and Steven Frank had one goal with Audion: "we wanted to listen to our music CDs on our computers while we worked, and we wanted it to be stylish."[1] During Audion's development, MP3 files became a popular means of listening to music on a computer, and Panic licensed an MP3 decoder for incorporation into Audion.

Audion was originally conceived as one piece in a set of small applications to be called PanicPack, but time constraints led to the release of Audion 1.0 as standalone application on August 16, 1999.

Audion became known for its MP3 decoder, which is reputed to produce sound with superior fidelity. Sasser said this was an accident, and that he and Frank have no idea how they achieved this.[1]

Apple tried to meet with Cabel and Steven to hire them to create the original version of iTunes based on their work on Audion. The meeting never took place, and Apple instead acquired Audion rival SoundJam MP as the basis for iTunes.[1]

Audion was retired on November 11, 2004.[2]

gollark: I mean, apart from support, AVIF is not very good in terms of being supported by anything at all, but it's technologically superior.
gollark: Also, JPEG bad AVIF good.
gollark: I think palaiologos wanted to get around their self-muting by leaving and rejoining. So hi.
gollark: But I think you could say that lots of things which kill you just work by reducing the amount of something or other in your body.
gollark: Well, that's the mechanism apparently, but the effect is that if you drink too much water you die.

See also

References
  1. "Panic - Extras - The True Story of Audion". www.panic.com. Retrieved 2018-09-15.
  2. Farewell Audion Archived September 28, 2007, at the Wayback Machine
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