Dear Audion Owner,

Remember Audion? :) One of the first, and certainly the most stylish, Macintosh MP3 player/encoders, Audion was released in 1999 and really helped Panic become the little Macintosh company it is today. At some point you bought a copy of Audion, to which we're quite thankful.

Lately, though, you may have noticed that there haven't much activity with Audion. To be honest, there's been activity, but it's been going on behind-the-scenes -- and a great deal of that has been decision-making.

The result? We've made the decision to "retire" Audion after nearly 5 years of wonderful service.

. . .

Q. Why did you make this decision?
A. The answer starts with an "i", but there's a lot more to it.

The short answer, obviously, is that it's become increasingly difficult for Audion to compete with iTunes -- a free program, that comes with every copy of Mac OS X, and works quite well for 95% of Mac digital audio users -- and our sales clearly reflect this. While we could pour time and money into making Audion something "more", we're certain the returns would not match the effort.

But, that's the oversimplified answer. There's much more to the story. In order to explain it fully -- and if you want to understand the true thought behind this decision -- I've taken the time to write the (ridiculously lengthy) "True Story Of Audion".

http://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/

The last few paragraphs explain fully the rationale behind this decision. But the full story contains all sorts of interesting things, such as how Audion almost became iTunes (!), how we almost became an AOL / Time Warner company, and our how Apple boardroom meeting with Steve Jobs went.

If you're an Audion fan, or a Panic historian, I promise it's worth your time to read the whole thing.

PS. Read the Audion Story. Seriously. It's good.

Kinda like a Homestar Runner narrative.