Audion was a media player developed by

Panic Panic is a sudden sensation of fear, which is so strong as to dominate or prevent reason and logical thinking, replacing it with overwhelming feelings of anxiety and frantic agitation consistent with an animalistic fight-or-flight reactio ...

. It was originally a commercial (

shareware Shareware is a type of proprietary software that is initially shared by the owner for trial use at little or no cost. Often the software has limited functionality or incomplete documentation until the user sends payment to the software developer ...

) program, but with the dominance of Apple's

iTunes iTunes () is a software program that acts as a media player, media library, mobile device management utility, and the client app for the iTunes Store. Developed by Apple Inc., it is used to purchase, play, download, and organize digital mul ...

, development was halted and it was released as

freeware Freeware is software, most often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for the f ...

. It was retired on November 11, 2004. In January 2021, an updated, stripped–down version was released for macOS 10.12.Panic Blog – Facing Forward
/ref>

Design

One of the features of Audion that set it apart from its rivals, particularly

SoundJam SoundJam MP is a discontinued MP3 player for classic Mac OS-compatible computers and Rio-compatible hardware synchronization manager that was released in July 1999 and was available until June 2001. Jeff Robbin and Bill Kincaid developed SoundJa ...

, was its user interface, which featured transparency through a process that mimicked the functionality of alpha channels on Mac OS 9's

QuickDraw A quickdraw (also known as an extender) is a piece of climbing equipment used by rock and ice climbers to allow the climbing rope to run freely through protection such as a bolt anchors or other traditional gear while leading. A 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." 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 was 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. 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 SoundJam MP is a discontinued MP3 player for classic Mac OS-compatible computers and Rio-compatible hardware synchronization manager that was released in July 1999 and was available until June 2001. Jeff Robbin and Bill Kincaid developed SoundJam ...

as the basis for iTunes. Audion was retired on November 11, 2004. The final version was 3.0.2, released on August 22, 2002. In March 2020, Panic announced they would be updating hundreds of Audion's unique "faces," or skins, to work with modern versions of macOS.Panic Blog – Saving Face
/ref> On January 6, 2021, Panic released a stripped-down version of the player for macOS 10.12, with over 860 faces available.

References

Macintosh media players macOS media players Panic software 1999 software {{mac-software-stub

Design

History

See also

References