Day: November 11, 2004

Cabel Sasser at Panic Studios writes about Audion, arguably the first industrial strength MP3 player for the Mac—certainly the coolest—and his decision to retire it. It’s a pretty fascinating story, replete with “interrupt time,” Steve Jobs meetings, near-mergers with giant mega-corporations, and the market forces that led to the retirement of the app.

I downloaded Audion when I went to business school. It was one of the first apps on my first PowerBook (a G3 Pismo), and it was always on. I downloaded a bunch of wild skins before settling on the one that was the smallest possible space, and proceeded to raise eyebrows every time one of my Windows-using colleagues saw my screen. (“What is that? Oh, cool!”) I loved that it was hard to crash, that the music kept playing no matter (well, almost no matter) what I did to it in the foreground, and that it was just so damned cool.

And then… the Mac OS X Preview Release came out. And Audion wasn’t OS X native, but iTunes was. And I agonized over it for a while, but iTunes kept adding more and more stuff. And its library management was frankly a hell of a lot better than Audion’s, which relied on the filesystem. With iTunes, I could sort and search by all kinds of obscure attributes, and it didn’t move around the MP3 files in their folders when I did so. And so Audion shuffled slowly off into obscurity. I just recently got around to deleting the playlist files it left behind.

Cabel’s story is instructive—for small software developers, for Mac developers in particular, for fans of the digital music revolution, and for anyone who wants to work in a small company. It’s exhilarating and heartbreaking and very, very informative.

In my spare time, I’ve been playing quite a bit with Delicious Library, and it remains pretty delicious. As I scanned in 13 books, 71 movies, and 748 761 CDs (to date) I’ve had some time to think about things I would change with the application.

1. Smart shelves: give me an opportunity to do advanced searches on a bunch of criteria, including signed items, rare items, and other attributes, and save them as persistent “smart shelves”
2. iTunes integration: There are a ton of opportunities in this area, including:
   • Check the iTunes library to see if the CD has already been ripped to iTunes
   • Smart lists to show albums that have not been ripped
   • If it has, allow playing the CD by double clicking the album cover
   • For music bought in the iTunes store, I’d love to see a way to list them in the inventory, separately from CDs, and using the standard iTunes 99 cent prices, figure out how much I’ve under- or overpaid by using the iTunes store instead of Amazon
3. Images: I’d love to be able to paste my own cover art in, either for albums that aren’t in Amazon or ones where the cover art isn’t brought back with the rest of the information (um, never mind—apparently you can do this by drag and drop, though I still would like to see paste supported). I’d also like to be able to copy the art out.
4. Looking up information by keyword: This is probably my biggest gripe. As I mentioned in my original post, I have a lot of CDs with no bar codes as a result of too many years spent in CD clubs. Unfortunately, for classical CDs the search facilities that Delicious Library offers—title and “source”—are completely inadequate. The problem with classical discs is that the title of the disc is often three or four different releases, the “artist” can either be the performers or the composer (or even the conductor), and often there is little or no agreement between two sources about how the release should be filed. This means that I got quite intimate with the search functions on Amazon, trying the advanced classical search but increasingly giving up and using Google to find the album on Amazon.
5. HTML export of a catalog wouldn’t hurt either.
6. And how about user definable fields on items? I’d love something to indicate whether I’ve posted an item to my blog already; one or more URL fields for additional info about the item; and even a catalog number (LOC and Dewey Decimal format)
7. And while I’m asking for silly things, how about skinnability? Normally this isn’t a feature I look for in an application, but the default woodgrain on the library shelves really hurts my eyes.