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The title of 'best MP3 player' has been hotly contested ever since MP3 music first took off. But winners are breaking through. Panic, the maker of Audion, has just released Audion 2.1, and this looks like it will take some beating. The biggest news is that Audion now supports MP3 encoding. Previously it was a player only, but now it can encode any item in any playlist. Users can choose between the industry standard Fraunhofer MP3 encoder engine or the popular PMLAME. The default settings produced excellent results, reaching well over 7x playback speed with our test files on a Power Mac G4. It can also encode any file to AIFF. Audion is more than just an MP3 player/encoder, it is also a capable audio CD player tool, and will happily play AIFF, Ogg Vorbis (.ogg files) and WAVE audio files. Audion treats all audio sources alike; MP3 files, CD audio tracks and Internet audio streams can be mixed in a single playlist. And because Audion uses plug-in files for virtually all its features, adding support for future formats should be relatively painless. Visual effects, something previously associated with SoundJam, have finally been added to Audion. Most of the time this is a pretty redundant feature, as anyone that plays music while they work will testify. But there are times, generally at parties, when psychedelic animations linked to the music are just what's wanted, and Audion 2.1 satisfies this desire perfectly. Visuals can be shown full-screen, and vital Audion keyboard shortcuts (play/pause, next track and so on) still work in this mode. Panic also wisely designed Audion 2.1 to use SoundJam-compatible visual plug-ins, taking advantage of existing software rather than trying to kick-start a new format. The playlist management, already pretty good, has been improved.
Audion has always supported different 'faces', designed by users and posted on the Panic site. Now a Hue Adjustment feature can change the colour of any face, so users can match their favourite face design to their flavour of iMac or their desktop colour. In the mix Budding DJs will like the new crossfade ability. Multiple player windows and playlists can be opened at once, and playback faded from one player window to the other with a simple slider, whatever the audio sources. This feature isn't exactly sophisticated; mixing is strictly a manual affair, but it does work well. On top of that, custom playback speed and equaliser settings can be applied to individual player windows. There's even a karaoke mode, which makes a reasonable attempt to filter out vocals from songs as they play. The window for editing MP3 tags has grown into a bit of a powerhouse. It now works on tracks being played, and as well as the standard text fields for artist, title, album and so on, relative volume adjustment and equaliser settings can be applied. You can even pick your own rating for tracks - from 'hate it' through 'ehh' to 'love it' - and see these as Sherlock-style ranking bars in playlists. And finally, thumbnail album cover graphics can be embedded in MP3 tracks and shown as they're played. If you want to edit MP3 tracks more directly, the MP3 Editor window presents a selected track in editable waveform mode. Drop a track into the window, then cut, copy and paste to trim dead air or splice tracks together as you like. The range of features in Audion 2.1 is extraordinary, and they are presented in an incredibly clear and logical manner. Its approach is different from that of Apple's iTunes, which aims at users who want a simple player, encoder and CD burner. Audion, with its plethora of features, aims at more advanced users, but retains an easy-to-use interface. This is one of the best MP3 players we've seen so far, on any platform, and Panic are already working on the Mac OS X version. Life is good. By Keith Martin |
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