Panic Inc.'s Audion is one of the latest mp3 players to grace Mac users. While it boasts the usual array of features one would expect from a quality mp3 player, including some of the best visuals of any mp3 player and an excellent playlist, a few shortcomings prevent it from being a stand-out player.
Audion offers support for both mp3s, audio CDs, and streaming Shoutcast/Icecast features, which is identical to what competing products such as SoundJam MP and MACAST offer. While Panic Inc. boasts about Audion's "Original 3-Mode Design" that lets you toggle between the different play modes with a click, SoundJam MP and MACAST don't need to toggle at all; audio CDs are played in the same manner as mp3s and entering a URL is all it takes to play streaming audio.
Audion offers a variety of Faces, known as Skins in SoundJam MP and MACAST, to change the appearance of the player and this where Audion clearly outshines the other players. The folks at Casady & Greene, creators of SoundJam MP, could especially take a note from Panic Inc. on designing sleek and functional skins.
Along with very high quality faces, Audion also supports alpha channels which add transparency and shadows to the player. While visually impressive, alpha channels slow down the speed it takes to redraw the player if you move it or close a window in front of it, even on a fast G3, which means that there is a one or two second delay when switching to the application if it's in the background, something that can become quickly tiring. Fortunately you can toggle the alpha channels on or off, allowing you to sacrifice appearance for speed.
The most important aspect of an mp3 player is the quality with which it plays back mp3s. Audion offers excellent playback quality for mp3s encoded at 160 and 192 kbps, but it didn't sound as good as either MACAST or SoundJam MP when playing mp3s encoded at 128 kbps that contained many low frequencies. Audion also offers an excellent equalizer, but in the end it's no match for the combination of SoundJam MP and Aboretum's Realizer plug-in, which comes bundled and only functions with SoundJam MP (see our SoundJam MP review for more information on Realizer).
Second to playback quality, playlist support is the next most important feature for any mp3 buff. Audion's playlist is similar to MACAST with a standard Mac OS Platinum appearance that displays the track name, length, and play order, but doesn't compare to SoundJam MP's visually similar but functionally superior playlist. Like both MACAST and SoundJam MP, Audion allows for mp3s to be dragged and dropped into the playlist and offers both shuffle, repeat one, and repeat all play modes.
Audion suffers from a couple minor, but annoying, interface problems. The most annoying problem is that the position slider, which allows you to quickly jump to any position in a song, requires you to "Get Info" for the song in order to access it, a tiresome two-step process. Also, controls for repeat and shuffle can only be found in the menu bar with no keyboard shortcut. Then there's the performance issue with redrawing the player if alpha channels are enabled.
At $17.95, Audion is the the least expensive of the three primary mp3 players for Mac users. While it's a solid offering, especially at its price, Audion ends up being little more than average.
