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The Real Story of Audion
mijkal writes "Panic's Audion music software has been retired and made freely available. The developer has a nice write up on his experiences with Audion in relation to early-MP3 days, failed AOL deals, and the could-have-been iTunes app. It's an inspiring read on the history of a shareware developer and his adventures thus far."
I don't think I would have chosen "inspiring" as the adjective in this case.
It's an inspiring read on the history of a shareware developer and his adventures thus far.
Shareware developer? I know what a Spyware developer is, and I know of open source and closed source; but is there really such a thing as a shareware developer anymore? There's adware, begware and nagware (hardly any freeware left, but there is some)... but this shareware is not computing. I can't think of one product that is truly shareware; "A shareware program is accompanied by a request for payment, and often payment is required per the terms of the license past a set period of time (although some consider this requirement to cause the software to be not shareware but a demo)."
Well I guess Audion is going the way of actual freeware. Nice!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Speaking of old MP3 stuff, there was once Sonique but it went by the wayside after it was bought by lycos and the original creative team was disbanded.
Sometimes it's better for everyone if some big corporation doesn't buy an application because then the developers and creative people stay together simply for the love of the project and breakthrus can be made rather than pandering to profit margins......
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Much preferred SoundJam, mainly from an interface point of view, but also because Panic's apps aren't the most stable things in the world. It (SoundJam) still does things that I much prefer to iTunes, mainly no song database and having Finder-labeled files showing up in their proper colours in the playlist. Very useful for quickly finding all the bad files I label Brown. :)
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
It's nice that this program is being made available, rather than becoming a footnote, lost forever, in the software history books. Kudos to the programmer for being considerate of his users.
This is kind of a breath of fresh air for me. I hardly ever read accounts of Apple developers. There are infinite stories of Linux and Windows developers, but finally having the experiences of an Apple coder published is pretty cool.
- dshaw
http://www.panic.com/audion/download.html
"Audion has been retired. It is now free of charge, but is no longer being actively developed, and is provided as-is without support. We hope you continue to enjoy Audion!"
http://www.panic.com/audion/buy.html For OSX and 8.6(+)
A solid tale of adventure, including the Reality Distortion Field.
their logo bears a striking resemblence to Vignette's
I know Audion plays more audio formats than iTunes, and as freeware it's worth downloading just for that even if all else were equal.
Freaking pathetic. These guys passed up an opportunity to become iTunes, and why?? Because they thought AOL was going to solve all of their problems, because they couldn't hold a frickin' meeting without them?!? I know it's easy to spot in retrospect, but that's so pathetic, it should have been easy to spot at the time... I mean, you're an Apple developer and Apple wants to meet with you, so you... don't??!? What would Apple have had to do to buy these guys big frickin' houses?!?
Tell you what - if you're a small software developer being contacted by Apple, hire me as your managerial consultant. I'll make sure you meet with them, at the very least!!
The funniest thing is the referral to the /. announcement of the iPod.
:)
With my 20/20 hindsight glasses, the comments are hysterical.
CmdrTaco editorialized "Lame." Many vehemently predicted a miserable failure: "I don't see many sales in the future of iPod."
At the time, I thought "Really cool, but really expensive." Who could have known it would be so popular!
Please help find my missing daughter: FindSabrina.org
I don't quite get the sine qua non of the story, although its a nice story and I'd like to.
Let's see... They're so enamoured of Jobs that they have "brain expolosions" in his presence.
They love making their software.
Jobs courts them.
They pass.
They stop making the software.
Now they're happy ever after without Steve and without making the software??
When Frank did it his way he got to keep the money and the software.
Oh and there were women.
Still, it's nice to read a story from happy people.
Okay, I'm not a huge MP3 hoarder, and never was, but I never really got into MP3s ever because all the audio programs seemed "too cool." It was cool to make an audio player that supported visual features? Why? Back in the days before napster:
Me: Hey, are there any programs that can play these MP3s?
MP3 guru: Are there? d00d! Look at these MP3 players!! This one has awesome support for skins and its skins are cross compatible! Look at all the choices you have to make your MP3 player look cool!
Me: ummmm yea but is it easy to use and will it play my Mp3s?
MP3 guru: and this one supports alpha channeling so it's like L337 n' stuff!
Me: Hello? How does making the player transparent make it work better. Does this audio program even have audio features? And what is L337? Some kind of code to unlock the program?
----
Basically I never got why back in the day so much time was spent on how the player looked vs. how the player worked. Even these days, there are visual features of iTunes (such as that weird psychedelic screensaver thingie that changes shapes while different music is playing) which I just don't get why anyone wants them. I just want to listen to music and I want my software to make sense!
It seemed like MP3 players were designed by the niche and for the niche, until MP3s were no longer a niche.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
I'm about 2 months in on owning my first Mac (thrilled by it, thanks) but the one thing I couldn't help notice is the absolute dearth of good mp3/audio players on OS X. iTunes is grating on my nerves! Can anyone recommend an audio/mp3/media player (pref. one that takes advantage of Cocoa) that's a little more poweruser friendly?
#roses { color: #ff0000; } #violets { color: #0000ff; }
The Mac platform has a pretty good shareware community that is helped by sites like MacUpdate and VersionTracker. The Mac, having a smaller percentage of the market, has the benefit (for shareware developers at least) of having more holes that shareware developers can fill. So if you have a great idea and can turn it into a great app, then you have a good chance of finding success in the Mac market. Watson, Konfabulator, and NetNewsWire are a few great shareware apps on the Mac. Unfortunately Apple might decide to fill the same holes that your app might fill as was the case with Watson and now Konfabulator.
I have found a small amount of success myself with my Shareware app, HyperSpell. But its nothing I could ever quit my day job over. Mainly its something to do in my spare time and it filled a hole that I wanted filled. The biggest problem most shareware developers face is just getting people to know that their app exists (marketing).
--
Not free as in effort, but I'm willing to try it.
Free Flat Screens | Free iPod Photo
infested with jello like fishes no melotron wishes
Oh. My preferences aren't to blame; they don't prevent any stories from showing up in my RSS aggregator, but work fine when I call up slashdot.org in my browser.
-Rich
Wheres the source?
Or are we going to follow a car analogy where we can replicate it at will, but it'll keep getting rustier and more out of date until we end up with landfills full of anachronistic crap?
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
I'm writing this because I too am part of the small fraternity of Mac MP3 application developers. I was part of a three man team writing MusicMatch Jukebox for Mac OS when iTunes was released. And soon afterward I was out of a job.
I know that iTunes would have crushed all competition anway, but Steve Jobs is the guy who saw through the stupidity of skins. WinAmp had them, so every MP3 player has skins. You can read in the article about the incredible amount of wasted development effort spent on improving the skins-giving them transparent corners and whatnot.
At MusicMatch we spent a third of our time developing the skinning engine. And what did we end up with? A lot of ugly, non-intuitable windows designed by graphic artists with no concept of UI design, windows that docked in some skins but not others, and with list views that couldn't expand because of the surrounding bitmapped edges. If we'd have settled on a standard interface and just worked on getting the music database, radio streaming, and audio playback working we'd have finished much, much faster, and given the user a nicer experience to boot.
Steve saw what was valuable in a music player and told the SoundJam guys to junk everything else. Simplify. Simplify. And the result is the preeminent digital music player.
The Panic guy writing the linked article even now doesn't admit the wasted effort, and why he couldn't come up with a list of reasons why Panic 2 was better than iTunes 1.
So, after reading this article, one can arive at only one point: AOL, not only killing Window's MP3 playing, also had a hand in the death of awsomeness on the mac. If Panic had not been in talks with AOL at the time of the first Apple meeting, Apple would have used Panic insted of Soundforge. So, it just goes to show the all the AOL users out there, 2?, that AOL = "The Devil"!!
What was interesting on the Apple / AOL stuff was that their focus was less on what kind of company they would wanted to partner with, and instead on other stuff (getting AOL to snap them up faster).
But even with that goal, seems kind of bad form to invite AOL executives to their apple meeting. Give AOL a heads up, of course! But blowing off a meeting or inviting some other company entirely to a meeting is a bit weird. Too complicated by half.
What people forget is that there is no harm in hearing what others have to say. Rather then try to work out every angle and edge, why not just book the meeting and attend it?
But cool to see a relatively happy group of folks!
I know this is going to sound incredibly mean, but... You were a programmer on MusicMatch for Mac? How do you sleep at night? That had to be the worst Mac MP3 player ever. It was about three years behind the windows version, it was slow, had a terrible UI, and god was it ugly! iTunes may have been the final nail, but nothing could have saved that application aside from a redesign from the ground up. Sorry, but I the pain of trying to use that is still fresh in my mind. I a sure it isn't your fault.
In theory, it sounds all good to meet with Apple. I mean hey, they rock, don't they? They have a cool culture, cool products, etc. But c'mon...give these guys a break. First, they didn't know they were going to be asked to be iTunes. Hell, maybe in the back of their heads they were thinking Steve (Jobs) just wanted to shut them up. It's easy for you to say they were dumb now, but back then...they had no clue. And let's not forget...everyone laughed at the idea of mp3s being a viable money maker. It was just for college kids to steal music and play...
Let me ask you this. Do you run your own shop? I commend them for thinking about what they want in life. Like he said, they're young, not married, so why not go for it? Follow your dreams. And if the going gets tough, I'm sure Jobs would have no problem hiring them if they said "we need a job". I for one am impressed with their decision. It was tough, and they're following their dreams.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
Before iTunes existed and for some time after.
This article is a good read, btw.
Do I miss SoundJam? Hell, yes. Though, I will admit, that iTunes still reminds me of SoundJam every now and then. And I still install SoundJam on the pre-OS X Macs I do work on.
Will I miss Audion? Yes and no. It never really met the level I wanted to see out of a player. I liked the fact that it still existed but, after the rise of AAC, I saw the writing on the wall and assumed that Audion would barely limp along after that.
That said: Panic also makes a kick-ass FTP client called Transmit. I'm a proud paying user of that app and highyl suggest it to any one looking for a good OS X FTP client.
Waaaahhhh it has a pop up asking me to purchase it. it's evil....
Your definitions of shareware are soo out of whack it is not funny.
Shareware is software you are authorized by the author to distribute but you are not allowed to charge for and either the software has a time out function or some other way the author (ie a pop up or something in the readme file) reminds you he expects to be paid.
The idea behind shareware is that the users are able to "SHARE" the software with their friends/associates/random strangers. It is way of advertising by word of mouth, and no, Shareware can and usually does require registration. What your are mistaking for shareware is freeware or donation-ware (ie. bittorrent client).
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
I sleep pretty well, as I did my part well. The projects since where I've had more control of the interface have been much less ugly; attractive even. As I said in my earlier post, we were constrained by the insane cult of skins. When not debugging, I used the plain vanilla skinless theme and that worked fairly well.
And the internals of the Mac version were pretty well done. It was difficult getting skip-free playback under Mac OS 9, and even more difficult debugging it. I worked hard to get the database fast for a reasonable number of songs, and to have little overhead on the equalizer. It was a work in progress and given time would have become a solid product; it was certainly more cleanly coded than the PC version.
However, we had nobody on staff, in a position of authority at least, who had Steve's sense of esthetics, software design or UI design.
If MusicMatch had such a person on staff, maybe they'd have cost Yahoo some serious money when they were bought out.
I thought you were funny as "Larry" in Three's Company.
This story was one of the best I have read in recent memory.
That said, I hate it when great programmers just sit on a product and stop innovating or coming up with new directions to take their product.
In my opinion, Panic should try to become something like Pixo and create great Mac friendly interfaces for Mp3 portable players or work with Napster and Real, and Microsoft to produce a player that will play secure WMP files well on a Mac.
My preference was always towards SoundJam over Audion, but still after SoundJam became iTunes - I leaned towards Audion for the custom skins.
If interested, I wrote a bit about this on my website.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Just how was Speed Racer's post offtopic? The Audion article is, in part, about the trials and travails of shareware development. This side discussion might be slightly off tangent, but it's still relevant to the discussion at hand.
Those who complain about affect & effect on
i worked for scopus, bought by siebel. millions of lines of code, all trashed
i worked for centerrun, nee raplix, bought by Sun. 40 people worked really hard to make a great product. now you can find it on sun's site, if you look carefully. advertising budget/market awareness of solution? zero
if you sell your software company, you can be confident the software will cease to exist.
Scott Bakula/javaxman - go find your quantum leap and do it. Hindsight is 20/20...
To be honest though, AOL vs the company that your market comes from - I'd lean to Apple over AOL too.
The real moral of the story is that honesty/loyalty has no place in business. Look out for #1 - it's easier/better to call to say you won't take someone's offer compared to begging for table scraps. Comes between you and someone else - send flowers, and date their wife.
With regards to the sound quality difference between Audion and SoundJam, I wonder if it was the GUI that influenced a perceived difference. If you like something, you can fool yourself to make it look better.
I've been using Transmit another product from Panic software, for a couple years now. Its a FTP client and so much better than anything else out there that I've upgraded from the command line and bought a licence.
If you had bothered to follow the link to Wikipedia that started the brou-ha-ha and read through to the software types you are griping about, you would have discovered that "nagware," "adware," "demoware," et al, are just sub-categories of shareware, not entirely different concepts.
To say that only software given away with no means of enforcing payment can claim to be shareware shows a decided lack of knowledge of history about how shareware came to be and it's place in computing prior to the Internet. The original releases of Wolfenstein 3-D and Escape Velocity had just as much business calling themselves "shareware" as Maelstrom or PC-File.
Those who complain about affect & effect on
Ok, I know these guys go on about how the creative control is gradually taken away from them and all that other negative stuff. But what did AOL buy nullsoft for? 109 Million wasn't it?! 109 Million.
Did AOL even try to low ball em a little?!
Hey Nullsoft, AOL callin, we're interested, Whats say uhmm, I don't know 109 MILLION Freakin dollars? How's that sound emmm?
Seriously, anyone know the story of how that all came about?
People who get married make more money, and are healthier, on the average as most studies have concluded. That's a good thing about getting married! If you can do that without getting married, great! I think money and health are something any rational person will try to obtain.
I think, in general, that statement of marriage/money is true. However, when you have a wife and two kids to support, it's not easy to say "hon, I'm not going to have a 'real' job with health insurance and a steady paycheck. Just deal with it". I had the dream of starting my own company for a while, but I would in no way put my kids and wife at risk for something that may or may not succeed. I can handle eating ramen for two years, but I won't do that to my kids. After a divorce, I quit my job at Siemens (and it was quite cushy), started a company, ate ramen, and never looked back.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
Interesting - that was always Woz's strategy as well. He wouldn't be happy until he had ripped all but one or two IC's out of a drive controller design.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
But I have to disagree your characterization of the Panic guy's views. While he mentions the interface was a major differentiator, especially the alpha part, for the most part, they did those things without losing sight of the big picture--making a clean, Mac-like interface. And he explicitly shows his lament for the time they placed too much emphasis on skinning:
I think you may have been too close to things or maybe just missed that quote, but it seems that it pretty much discounts your last point.Vote Quimby.
Well, I think you can see that not joining with Apple was a bad call. These people wanted to stay in the shareware business. That's incredibly stupid, I say. Now if they had big business plans (like I do and I'm sure you do), now that would be totally different.
developers story that was beat to death about Spotlight/Launchbar, Dashboard/Konfabulator issues? Does Apple get some credit for seeing technologies they wanted to incorporate and then compensating the company that they chose.. and then making an offer to the one they didn't!
I was sort of going from a holistic point of view about the article in that he spent several paragraphs talking about what was great about Audion and it was all about the skins, he seemed to have little regard for the actual audio generating code, which he describes as being nothing special, and makes no mention I can recall of the database engine. I'm sure it was better than that, but it wasn't what he himself emphasized about what was great about his own product.
Also, I read the sentence you clipped the first time (a couple parsing attempts actually) , and I read it the exact opposite of how you are interpreting it. "..., but now without some casualties." Since he says to replace the word "casualties" with "overall improvements", the sentence would read "..., but not without some overall improvements." You seem to be interpreting the statement as a negative assessment of the events of 2001 in terms of product development, while I think he's saying that 2001 resulted in both products being improved, but without Audion becoming better than SoundJam.
Of course, I could be misinterpreting things, it was an odd sentence.
Actually, don't talk to Apple. They're interested in you? They must have other things on their mind. Furthermore, don't entice them of any features that you think is a cool unique idea in your app. Features can easily be duplicated. Look at what happened to song ratings and play counts in Audion. Now Apple put them in iTunes.
Really, if you keep quiet about it, maybe Apple will never notice you, and you get to survive.
I once had a signature.
You don't think mpg321 is lightweight enough for you? What about mplayer? It plays audio just fine.
I once had a signature.
What I'd be interested to see is a history "story" like that written by Andrew Welch of Ambrosia Software, whose games I played ever since Maelstrom (In fact, Maelstrom was one of the first games I played on my parents' IIci back in 1994).
;)
When Escape Velocity came along, Ambrosia SW became one of my favorite game developing companies. That game was so fun... I spent many nights staying up way too late playing it. What was also great was my Windows-using friend was very jealous he couldn't get the game on his machine (until far later, anyway). Ahh it was so nice to have the tables turned, for once.
Anyway, they totally need to write up a cool history like the Panic one! Ambrosia surely has some very interesting stories to tell...
FTA...
Umm - they are a success. They turned down an invitation to join Apple from Mr. Jobs himself because they decided they'd be happier working for themselves.
They're sufficiently evolved (devolved?) to realise money != happiness.
The real story of Audion is incomplete without mentioning the inventor - Lee de Forrest. He patented his Audion in 1907. John Abrose Fleming sued him for copying his diode. (Fleming's design was the same as a previous Edison discovery. de Forest's was a distinct improvement.)
But I'm sure you already know that, since you're so smart and read Slashdot.
I love it when people re-use words a terms, then claim them as their own.
"Steve Jobs is the guy who saw through the stupidity of skins"
I disagree. Why is there a metalic and aqua interface in OSX? Why does quicktime player for windows use a custom skin theme instead of using standard controls? Why does aqua look like something a skinner would make? Why are the desktop accessories skinable? Why do Apple products have a lot of useless eye candy like translucent windows, drop shadows, ripples. Hell even the spotlight search in the prefs dialog uses this spotlight eyecandy effect to highlight based on the relevance of your search.
What Jobs thought is he didn't care about there being an iTunes skin community plus he thought that the metal theme was good enough.
While consistency of interface is important, and it is something Apple slips up on, what you are generally talking about is not skinning. The quicktime player is not typically using a "skin." Some software engineer (this is a guess) spent a lot of laying out an interface, hard coding behaviors into C++, making sure everything scaled well as windows are resized and generally making sure that the one and only interface looked good and was responsive.
Aqua does not look like something a skinner would do, as it is seamless and beautiful, something that is very hard to do with the bitmaps typically used in skins (as of the year 2000, last time I had to deal with this, perhaps vectored graphics are available today) and really shows the power of designing an interface in C++ or Objective-C with a full range of OpenGL calls at your disposal. Look at the pulsing of a Aqua progress bar, the poof of an icon being removed from a dock, the transparent overlay of the volume control, the shiny middle of a metal window. All very hard to do with a skinning interface.
I do crossplatform development these days using Trolltech Qt. You can make interfaces which will look like Aqua windows on the Mac, but not quite. If you look closely you can see they are pathetic simulations of the real thing, filled with lifeless bitmaps where lively, hand coded OpenGL controls and beautiful translucent layers should be found. Or you can turn on some other theme, and not even try to simulate such high art.
It is true that you can open most Cocoa app's package, load a nib file into Interface Builder, hit a checkbox and poof you have a metal interface, although probably a not well layed out one. Well, this is more of a theme than a skin, as it isn't a generic invitation to add/remove arbitrary elements or make all the windows toroidal.
It is also true that you can play skinned movies from within the Quicktime Player. I had cause to create several of these using LiveStage Pro for a short contract last year, and it's nice to be able to do so, but it is not a general purpose substitute for the base movie player interface.
Their idea of success is not a coomon one.
Their philosophy would put most companies under.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Was Audion really good? Don't know - never used it.
All I know is Panic bite the big one and they must be getting desperate for free airplay.
Good riddance to the wankers I say.
--- Das einzige, das wir zu fürchten haben, ist die Furcht selbst.
RTFA - they MISSED the meeting they didn't turn Apple down.