Audion Retired

Audion, one of the first (and arguably the best) MP3 players on the Mac
has been officially retired. iTunes was too much for it to take. Panic
lives on, and they've posted an amazing and fascinating story about the
life and times of a startup software developer with an unexpectedly hot
product.

Well worth a read, despite its length.

http://panic.com/extras/audionstory/

It's also worthwhile to note that unlike most companies killing
products, Panic has made Audion freeware (go try it out!) and also sent
out a special discount coupon to every registered Audion user. Very
cool to stand by your customers and products that way.

--Nik

<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07887>

It is indeed a shame - I would argue on the side that Audion was (and is) better than iTunes. The main reason is the fact that it has a hierarchical folder view. I have collected many gigabytes of music from web based labels, plus created mp3s using my Mambo Jukebox (direct recording, something that made me choose it over an ipod). Few of these have good tag information, and while I am putting basic information in ones that I now create, the backlog is too much to try and undertake. therefore my music is in folders and subfolders based on labels, genres and or artists.

With iTunes and cd-rom or folder from the desktop is just an indigestible list of track 1, 2 3 etc. With an Audion playlist you see the folders as on the desktop, and can select fodlers for playing and all the usual playlist work. And you can put in tag info if you want.

It also has a fast encoder.

Obviously it doesn't interface with iMusic, but then again, neither does iTunes in australia.

Jeremy Keens

On Nov 16, 2004, at 2:09 PM, jeremy keens wrote:

> It is indeed a shame - I would argue on the side that Audion was (and
> is) better than iTunes. The main reason is the fact that it has a
> hierarchical folder view. I have collected many gigabytes of music
> from web based labels, plus created mp3s using my Mambo Jukebox
> (direct recording, something that made me choose it over an ipod). Few
> of these have good tag information, and while I am putting basic
> information in ones that I now create, the backlog is too much to try
> and undertake. therefore my music is in folders and subfolders based
> on labels, genres and or artists.

I had a similar situation and found a pretty good fix.

I used an Applescript to rename files based upon the containing
folders. Then I used ID3X to add ID3 tag information based upon the
file name. The Applescript was pretty funky, but once the files were
named right, ID3X chewed right through them.

Media Rage can do the same thing in its more recent versions. (At the
time, ID3X was all that worked.)

Both apps can be found on MacUpdate. I don't have the URLs handy.

--Nik

On or about 11/12/04 1:39 PM, thus spake "Nik" <GerberiNik.net>:

> Audion, one of the first (and arguably the best) MP3 players on the Mac
> has been officially retired. iTunes was too much for it to take. Panic
> lives on, and they've posted an amazing and fascinating story about the
> life and times of a startup software developer with an unexpectedly hot
> product.
>
> Well worth a read, despite its length.
>
> http://panic.com/extras/audionstory/

I never liked Audion that much: I found it over-skinned (skins bore and
annoy me) and over-priced. However, it has one very useful feature that made
me grab the free version instantly: it lets you edit MP3 files "directly" in
a waveform editor, rather than having to convert them to AIFF and re-encode.
This is useful when you want, say, to "top-and-tail" an MP3 file that has
extra sounds or silences at the start and end, such as you might obtain by
recording with Audio Hijack Pro or by downloading with Acquisition. m.

--
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