Audion X - 3.0.2

Let me tell you how great this piece of software was/is... Notice how some people have testified here that it's a "light" mp3 player for every-day use? And one person said "iTunes is overkill for me"? That's how deceptively good Audion was/is. It would do a lot MORE than iTunes. iTunes, like much Apple software, removes features and/or (especially) user control, in order to "dumb it down" in homage to simplicity. Best example, perhaps, is that you have no option to play something with iTunes without it opening your entire library of umpteen thousand songs. With Audion, you don't have to open your library unless you want to. Thus you can easily use it to play just one song, or many. There are many more examples of why people love it.

All my mp3 files bear the Audion icon (the default for playing all my music). I use iTunes for certain things, but I use it secondary to Audion. In my favorite example, Audion has a better way to assign file names to new conversions. Very customizable, which is exactly what Apple is getting away from: user control.

I use OS 10.5.4, and Audion still works fine (relative to Tiger), except for one thing that I need to test further to confirm. I now cannot get the "Batch CD conversion" feature in Tools to work. That was handy. But I can still choose "Convert all playlist items" to accomplish the same thing... it's just one small extra step. (I highly suspect this is a quirkiness occurring with Leopard, and maybe any system still running Tiger would not lose this batch processing feature; but I'd need to test more to confirm; and I'd keep Tiger on one computer just for this reason, if that's the case!)

Over time, since Audion is no longer supported (it's FREE now), we'll probably find more features that don't work as we'd like. But I'm not daunted by any bugginess yet. Someone asked "Where are the 1000" radio stations? That's another thing that went (not sure exactly why). That feature FAR exceeded iTunes!!!! It was great to listen to radio from all around the world... no ads, no limitations, no goofy proprietary introductions playing before you got to the broadcast. But now that's essentially gone.

As for people wanting a simple, everyday mp3 player, I used to use one that was very simple and kinda cool, but can't remember what it was. Surely there are things out there still that could be found with a little digging. Might try using a widget or some other simple program that works in connection with iTunes (if you must go that route) but with iTunes itself staying in the back room with the door shut. Don't know. But snooping around might pay off.