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When Klystrack came up in the Advent Calendar last year, I was interested in the feature set, but ultimately got distracted by other things that day. So I wanted to take the opportunity to return to it here.

The features are pretty neat -- the oscillator sync, FM options, and rough chippy low-pass filter were fun to play around with. And after accidentally hitting some keyboard shortcuts, I was intrigued by the use of the two different speed settings for swing feel as well. (Someday I might try making another Klystrack song that seriously messes around with this setting.)

On the other hand, I did not find Klystrack fun to navigate. (It was validating to look through the other Klystrack entries in this battle and see everyone complaining about this.) But here's a more positive spin on it: I often feel I'm overly uptight about smoothing out the large-scale structure of a song, and by adding friction to the process of navigating this structure, Klystrack helped me loosen up, out of exasperation if nothing else!

(The one truly infuriating thing: the "play from current position" and "play from beginning of song" keyboard shortcuts are the opposite of what they are in OpenMPT, and they can't be remapped.)

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