Panic Releases an Audion Face Viewer ⇥ panic.com

Michael Buckley of 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.

I must say that it is both odd and comforting to see a version of Audion with a MiniDisc player skin running natively on MacOS Big Sur alongside lookalike modern apps.

If you have not yet read the story of how Audion almost became iTunes, now is a great time to do so.