Audion

» see panic.com/audion as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

audion shipped on 16 august 1999 as a mac mp3 player from a small portland company called panic. cabel sasser and steven frank wanted to listen to cds at their desks with a player that looked nice, and the version 1.0 they shipped that summer turned out to also have a really good mp3 decoder almost by accident. for the next two years audion and soundjam were the two real options if you used a mac and wanted to manage a music library on disk.

the story everybody knows is the apple meeting. apple reached out to panic about acquiring or licensing audion as the basis for a music app they were planning. the meeting was scheduled, then rescheduled, then panic was in the middle of audion 3 development and the timing did not work out. apple went and bought soundjam mp instead. that became itunes 1.0 in january 2001 and the rest is itunes-shaped history. audion held on through two more major versions before panic retired it on 11 november 2004.

this one i missed because i did not have a mac. i ran windows on a 33.6k modem in 1998 and on ttnet broadband from 2006 onward, and the mac side of the mp3 wars was somebody else's history to live through. i used winamp and sonique and a license-cracked musicmatch for the same years a mac user might have used audion. by the time i got close to a mac at all (in graduate school around 2010), itunes had been the default for nine years and audion was a fond memory in panic's company blog.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the meeting ~

cabel sasser wrote up the audion story years later on the panic website. apple's contact reached out in summer 2000 about a potential deal. the meeting was set, then bumped because the panic team had a deadline, then bumped again. when sasser called back to reschedule, apple had moved on. soundjam was the other option apple had on the table, and soundjam said yes faster.

nobody at panic was bitter about it in the writeup. they kept their company and went on to ship transmit and coda and prompt and playdate. that path has been better for the world than a parallel universe in which panic is the apple music team. but the apple-bought-soundjam moment is the closest the mac mp3 player category came to a different outcome.

~ the actual product ~

audion was good at being an mp3 player. the decoder was clean and the library management was lightweight. the customization layer was called faces (eight hundred and sixty of them by the end) and was the kind of thing only a small mac shop would bother to ship. audion 3 in 2002 was the high point. it added internet radio and a music search field that worked, plus a playlist-intelligence pass that itunes would copy later.

the freeware turn in late 2002 was the writing on the wall. panic dropped the price to zero because itunes was free and bundled and nobody was going to pay for a third-party music player anymore. by november 2004 they pulled the plug on development and turned the website into an archive.

~ the long tail ~

in 2021 panic released audion 4 as a free download for macos 10.12 and later. the eight-hundred-plus faces all work again, but the library and the playlists are gone, leaving just a player you can put on a desktop with a skin. that release is a love letter, not a product. the original audion is still gone in the sense that matters.

panic itself is still around in 2026, the year of this writing. they ship coda's descendant nova, transmit, playdate the handheld console, prompt for ssh on iphone, and firewatch and untitled goose game as a publisher. cabel sasser still writes long posts on the panic blog about software history. audion gets a paragraph in those posts the way old friends do.

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