Audion Editor's Review

Audion is an audio player wich features a lot of extra functionalities.

This application is an old program which is not under active development and it's provided without any support, but under a freeware licensing. Initially, it was a commercial product. In order to register it, check the producer's Website for a free serial number.

The audio playing support is quite nice even though the way how the playlist is implemented is a little bit unusable. It takes some time till you get used to it. It can play various audio formats as well as Internet audio streams.

The playback is quite smooth, but sometimes it has minor glitches when the system is loaded. The list of supported input formats is decent. It provides support for AIFF, mp3PRO, MPEG (Shrinke), OGG, SID, WAVE, and WMA.

The application also provides you a nice tag editor for the supported audio files. It also includes a audio editor module, but besides previewing the wave analysis of the file, I couldn't do anything with it.

If you own a bunch of audio CDs, then this program helps you store them on your hard drive. It includes an audio CD ripper which can easily encode the audio tracks into MP3 files.

Audion can record a stream or it can be a source client for SHOUTcast/icecast servers. So far, it's the best source client which I tested on Mac OS X. I've set up a SHOUTcast server in order to see if it works fine. The application did a very good job.

Besides listening, ripping and streaming, you can also encode with Audion. You can use either AIFF or a couple of MP3 encoders. You can't pick which format and quality settings would you like to use at the moment when you would like to transcode a file. You need to do this prior to the encoding process.

Audion has a Stream Guide module which fetches the popular radio stations directly from the SHOUTcast stations directory. You can limit the results by choosing the appropriate option from the provided drop-down menu and by using the dedicated search box.

The program supports skins. Besides the provided "faces" in the distribution package, you can use lots of other skins which are available on the producer's Website.

The player has a plug-in architecture which can extend it's default functionality. Another bundled feature is the visualizations support.

Pluses: it has a lot of features. Besides the audio playing it can also rip discs, rip Internet streams, it can transcode audio files, it can play the streams or it can act as a SHOUTcast/icecast source client. It supports custom skins. It has a plug-in architecture.

Drawbacks / flaws: the playlist implementation is a little bit unusable as you need to get used to it in order to use Audion at its full potential.

In conclusion: this is one of the best audio players for Mac OS X.

version reviewed: 3.0.2 Free