Well tonight I made quite the discovery while scrounging for a way to convert a WMA file (dang microsoft) into something a bit more tasteful, like mp3. I was having a heck of a time until I heard mention of Audion. Now I own my fair share of audio apps and figured that this one couldn’t be all THAT much different, but oh how wrong I was. My fascination began with the staggering assortment of available faces. Everything from futuristic to integrationist, from minimalist to just whacky! Over 400 user-created faces at my fingertips just blew me away. Talk about an awesome community. But the story only gets better. After a little digging I came across "The True Story of Audion." Twenty-four pages later I sat back in awe of what these two friends accomplished over the years. Starting out with plans to make their Macs great and ending up with a hugely successful mp3 player. Audion attracted attention from the likes of AOL and Apple. In fact, the creators of Audion were invited to meet with Apple 2000 and likely could have been on the team that designed iTunes had a scheduling conflict (not on Apple’s end) caused them to cancel the meeting. In the end iTunes began releasing features Audion couldn’t keep up with but even then the creators decided to stay independent and started Panic Software rather than join Apple (yup, they had a second offer and even met with Steve Jobs in person). Ok, ok, so maybe this story is only fascinating to programers and geeks, but I found it thoroughly impressive. Long live the little guys! They make my computing experience better every day