Audion - The Story behind Panic's 2nd product | Hacker News Reader

Audion - The Story behind Panic's 2nd product

panic.com

56 pointsamilr18 comments

Great story, and my favorite part was the link to the Slashdot iPod release story: "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."

My response "back in the day:"

http://weblog.raganwald.com/2004/11/sharecropping-in-orchard...

Aaah! Audion... fond memories. I quite dislike iTunes and I'm sure many share this sentiment, I wish they had attempted to keep up and go head to head with iTunes instead of retiring the product.

If, today, they brought it up to 2009 standards, and added iPod support, I'd bet they could take a good chunk of iTunes' marketshare on the Mac!

IIRC, iPod support was part of the problem, thanks to the DMCA and friends.

Yeah, I'd love to use a nice modern MP3 player on my Mac, but I guess no one will be making one again.

http://www.voxapp.net/

Current version lacks playlists, which makes it completely useless to me, but the developer says playlist support and folder scanning is on its way.

Thanks for the heads up on vox! It's definitely showing some promise. There is also http://cogx.org/, but it's very buggy and there hasn't been an update on the site in over a year :(

There's also Songbird http://getsongbird.com/ which though early and a bit bloaty has a interesting featureset over iTunes.

Last I checked it was also rather buggy. As in, it messed up almost any time I attempted to add song to my library, couldn't handle songs or artists special characters, and the iPod support was iffy. I like the UI and addons, but it has a long way to go before being usable.

Cog http://cogx.org/ is a nice reaaaaal simple MP3 player for OS X. I use it for whenever I want to just play one or two tracks from MP3 blogs without adding anything to my large, unwieldy, iTunes Library.

All I want is FLAC support, and global hotkeys for more than just play, next and previous, but it looks like it's not going to happen.

It would be nice to have foobar2000 on the Mac, but that's not going to happen either.

Did you try Fluke for FLAC playback? http://blowintopieces.com/fluke/ I know it's not native support but still better than nothing.

"Cog" and "Play" both do FLAC playback, but lack hotkeys and/or ReplayGain.

Fluke doesn't seem to offer any advantages over those.

Yes, a lot of people share that sentiment, but a lot don't. iTunes popularized the notion of organizing your music around a central database of meta data, an approach that allowed for far more flexibility and ease of use. Of course, you always come across the folks who think organizing your music on your file system is genius. These people probably think unix is better than Plan 9, too.

iTunes' biggest problem is that it doesn't even handle library management very well. :)

This story truly must be one of the great Mac stories of all time, but it's ancient when judged against the "News" in Hacker News.

Reposted many times but it's one of the best stories that has been linked to on HN (has everything: Apple, Jobs, boot-strapping, cutthroat competition, highs/lows, enterpreneurial journeys)

Note: Click on the images. They're worth it.

This one and the "Graphing Calculator Story",

http://www.pacifict.com/Story/

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7497796873809571567

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