Thursday, January 7, 2021

Audion 4.0

Panic:

Once upon a time, we made one of the earliest MP3 players for the Mac, Audion. We’ve come to appreciate that Audion captured a special moment in time, and we’ve been trying to preserve its history. Back in March, we revealed that we were working on converting Audion faces to a more modern format so they could be preserved.

Since then, we’ve succeeded in converting 867 faces, and are currently working on a further 15 faces, representing every Audion face we know of.

Today, we’d like to give you the chance to experience these faces yourself on any Mac running 10.12 or later. We’re releasing a stripped-down version of Audion for modern macOS to view these faces.

Previously:

Update (2021-01-15): Panic:

Open sourcing this fun project quickly paid off — @irskep turned our work into a very cool Spotify player!

5 Comments RSS · Twitter

Pretty cool. And you know, with all the in-app adverts for music subscriptions from Apple Music (nee iTunes) and Amazon Music, and the actual adverts in Spotify...

... I'd really like to have an old school mp3 (and AAC and Flac, admittedly) player, but I guess I have to hope for the open source community for that one...

It can play music files and streams, but it doesn’t have playlists, and we’re not offering support for it. Its primary purpose is to view faces in the converted format. In addition, we’re releasing the source code to document how these faces work and an archive of converted faces.

Still a neat little gift. Talk about some nostalgia there.

@Ruffin, there's a Mac version of foobar2000: https://www.foobar2000.org/mac

I haven't tried it though, so can't say if it's any good, but I remember the Windows version being pretty decent 15 years ago. :)

Releasing an app just to support old GUI customizations for that app has got to be the dog-waggingest tail I've ever heard of. :-)

Not sure how to use Audion or change the faces,, I can not seem figure out where the Faces need to be placed.. I am using a MacPro Mojave. 10.14.6. .. I remember the app from 20 years ago , I loved it,, the new OS is nothing like the old,,, Please advise me as to where to place the faces so I Amy use them .. Any assistance will be appreciated....

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