The Story of Audion (2004)

At the time when Audion, and Soundjam were the only (real) Mac MP3 choices, I worked at MP3.com.

I recall conversations over email, phone (and even in person once (unplanned "hey I'm...")) with Cabel, a great guy. Our email exchanges led to putting Audion into the MP3.com recommended players page.

Everyone at MP3.com (on the engineering side) loved the quality Audion app. When we saw that Soundjam had become iTunes, we gasped, "how could they choose that app over Audion?"

A lot of internet history during that time. One thing is for sure, content, and the access to that content is still the fuel of internet growth.

I tip my hat to Cabel, Audion, Panic, and the team. I always felt like you were one of us, as in Panic build quality products coded by team who care about what hey send out.

I hope your (money) ship comes in someday.

au revoir Audion, au revoir

Interesting to see this bubble up today. A great read.

I was an Audion customer back in the Napster days. (Not that I pirated music or anything, you know.) It was a pretty cool little program; really had no idea of the loops it was jumping through to get classic Mac OS to just play continuous music.

Since then I've picked up other Panic products; Coda is still an everyday tool for me.

> iTunes was, of course, and I'll say this now, brilliant. It single-handedly taught us an entirely new philosophy on software design. Do you really need that Preference that 1% of your users will use?

Hilarious with the context of what an awful beast iTunes became in the decade following.

Audion was awesome! I'm a huge Panic fan from way back, and every Panic success makes me very happy. (I'm the Charles mentioned in the article.)

Back in the day. This is a great post. I just found where to download this. The memories. Still have a G4 mirror door model that will run this and SoundJam. So cool to bring these back to life. This on the same day I just got my new Beats Studio3 Wireless cups. Juxtaposed.

Panic has always been a fantastic and creative developer, at least in the Mac space.

great read. always nice to read stories of honest competition that bring out the best in both sides (until apple swoops in, of course :). i wonder if they would have sold out to apple when they originally came calling to build iTunes the first time around had they not been tied up with AOL, rather than to just join after the fact.