 |
| Developer(s) | Panic |
|---|---|
| Final release | 4.0.1 / January 11, 2021 |
| Operating system | Mac OS X, Mac OS 9 |
| Type | Audio player |
| Website | download.panic.com/audion/ |
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 November 11, 2004.
In January 2021, an updated, stripped–down version was released for macOS 10.12. [1]
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.
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." [2] 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.[ citation needed ]
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.[ citation needed ] Sasser said this was an accident, and that he and Frank have no idea how they achieved this. [2]
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. [2]
Audion was retired on November 11, 2004. [3] 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. [4] On January 6, 2021, Panic released a stripped-down version of the player for macOS 10.12, with over 860 faces available. [1]
QuickTime is a discontinued extensible multimedia architecture created by Apple, which supports playing, streaming, encoding, and transcoding a variety of digital media formats. The term QuickTime also refers to the QuickTime Player front-end media player application, which is built-into macOS, and was formerly available for Windows.
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Panic Inc. is an American software and video game company based in Portland, Oregon. The company specializes in macOS and iOS applications and began publishing video games in 2016.
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William S. Kincaid is an American computer engineer and entrepreneur notable for creating the MP3 player SoundJam MP with Jeff Robbin that was eventually bought by Apple and renamed iTunes.
MacAmp is an early GUI-based MP3 audio player, first released on April 13, 1997, for the Macintosh by Dmitry Boldyrev of Nullsoft. Its MP3 decoding capability was based on the PlayMedia Systems AMP MPEG-2, Layers 1, 2 and 3 decoder.
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Opus is a lossy audio coding format developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation and standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force, designed to efficiently code speech and general audio in a single format, while remaining low-latency enough for real-time interactive communication and low-complexity enough for low-end embedded processors. Opus replaces both Vorbis and Speex for new applications, and several blind listening tests have ranked it higher-quality than any other standard audio format at any given bitrate until transparency is reached, including MP3, AAC, and HE-AAC.
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