I’ve been using Chronotron as my daily driver since Release 43, when it first supported playlists.
Even though Chronotron main purpose is to deconstruct tunes – audio and video material in general – and to assist musicians while they practice an instrument, the app has evolved over the years to become an all-rounder media player as well.
Having the developer spend more time testing the app is a good thing, but I also find myself using it regularly because Chronotron fits my own casual usage: I often play a lot of music and videos in sequence on a touchscreen-enabled laptop.
One killer app feature, at least when it comes to playlists, is the ability to apply different parameters – tempo, key, equalizer, etc. – to each individual track. You could, for example, play the same song multiple times at a different pace. And let’s not forget video! You could pump the brightness of those dark Michal Jackson videos a bit up, while playing all other clips in the playlist at the default setting.
As a lesser-known bonus, Chronotron lets you decide which parameters are specific to a playlist item, and which ones apply to the playlist as a whole. After all, you may want to play all video clips in your playlist mirrored without having to toggle the Horizontal Flip switch on every single track.
You do this via the Settings pane, as shown below.
All are unchecked by default, which means that each playlist item will remember its own settings for each parameter, but you can check the ones that will be remembered for the whole playlist regardless of the track (like Video Flip in the example above).
While there are a couple of features you might miss if you’re a Winamp nostalgic – gapless playback is one that comes to mind – Chronotron is still a capable media player.
Do you use Chronotron as your regular player? If not, what features prevent you from doing so? Let me know in the Comments section below.
Chronotron 