Audion

Audion was a digital audio player developed by Panic. It was originally a commercial shareware program, but with the dominance of Apple Computer's iTunes, development was halted and it was released as freeware. It was retired on November 11, 2004. However, in January 2021, an updated, stripped-down version of Audion 4 was released for macOS.

Design
One of the features of Audion that set it apart from its rivals, particularly SoundJam MP, was its user interface, which featured transparency through a process that mimicked the functionality of alpha channels in classic Mac OS's QuickDraw, a graphics API which did not provide real-time support for them at the time.

Development
Panic co-founder 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." During Audion's development, MP3 files were becoming a popular means of listening to music on a computer, and Panic licensed an MP3 decoder for incorporation into the program.

Release and reception
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. Sasser said this was an accident, and that he and Frank have no idea how they achieved this.

Apple Computer tried to meet with Sasser and Frank 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.

Retirement
Audion was originally retired on November 11, 2004 and was released as freeware without support. The last version at the time was 3.0.2, released on August 22, 2002.

Posthumous updates
In March 2020, Panic announced they would be updating hundreds of Audion's unique "faces," or skins, to work with modern versions of macOS. On January 6, 2021, Panic released a stripped-down version of the player for macOS 10.12 and later, with over 860 available faces.