Hey there, I must be missing something in the manual, and would appreciate if someone could point me in the right direction…
The issue I keep having is samples are disappearing from my sessions.
I chop up recordings, name them, and assign them to tracks, but, many sessions later, when I reopen the session, those samples are gone. The track is still assigned a sample, and will read [samp 17] on the SRC page, but the sample slot is empty [17: ------]. When I go to the library, there is no record of the sound existing except for the fact that the slot is empty. I am saving my projects consistently, and, as far as I can tell, there is no rhyme or reason to which samples get saved, which ones vanish without a trace, or when they disappear.
Is anybody else experiencing this? Can anyone point me towards a solution? I keep opening projects and needing to start from zero, recording or transferring samples.
Customer support said that this is the second recorded instance of this happening, and that they could not find any issues when they investigated the first faulty unit. They suggested I both stop using C6 and recording directly into the Digitakt, and instead use the Transfer app. They want to know if my samples disappear when I use the transfer app. I feel unqualified to do that, and like I will waste a lot of time and energy writing a story in disappearing ink, but I will keep you all updated. For science.
I have had samples vanish from various projects seemingly since the time of the last os update. They are always located in empty slots at the end of the sample list rather than amongst the others which seems very unlikely, more like the location of the sample is a result of the sample vanishing into thin air . I even have one pattern with 3 wiped tracks, oh and they are always recorded samples and there is no way of finding if they are just missing from the project or the +drive too.
Mine’s going in for a service next year, along with sticky buttons( that don’t get better)and encoders with a mind of their own its getting a bit too annoying to live with any longer.
I just looked through my samples, all the way to the bottom like you suggested, and none of them are there. They’re just gone.
I met with a rep from Elektron at a pre-Namm party. Really nice guy, gave me some recommendations about where to save samples. He also said that Digitakt will auto-save everything unless the power cable is disconnected before the machine powers down. I am using a furman for my setup, and when I am done at the end of the night, I turn off my whole setup at once. This, I thought, could be the issue. The furman cuts power to the machine, and any new progress that I have not already saved disappears.
However, I am a compulsive saver. I hit that save button every time I make anything new. And I just opened up another project that had a midi sequence I spent (no exaggeration) hours programming. Everything is gone. I haven’t even opened it recently. I had saved the project, saved the midi, turned off the machine, and, here’s the weird part, I had gone back to the project several times over the course of a few weeks while the midi sequencing still existed. Now, it’s like it never even happened. I am losing all of my work and this is becoming a totally useless tool to me. I’m incredibly disappointed with the digitakt, and really reluctant to trust it for anything.
So you are losing sequence data as well as samples?. Mine is only missing the samples, although I did notice a bunch of patterns in one project had lost their hat sample and it had been replaced with another random one, I never swap out populated sample slots with new ones so i am as certain as can be it wasn’t a saved mistake.
The only thing I know for sure is this is a pretty recent problem, in the 2.5 years I have owned it the only software issues that have appeared have been since I updated from 1.08 to the latest os, and now it seems to happen fairly often, as you say its disapointing and doesn’t exactly encourage use.
Yes, sequence and sample data. I really can’t believe all of that midi data is gone. There was so much of it… And @jefones, I have no idea how to reproduce this problem. As far as I can tell, it is something that ‘just happens’ when I use my digitakt.
Who here is turning the Digitakt off from a power strip rather than using the built in power switch? I’ve never experienced this behavior, and I have many saved patterns and a half-full plus drive that’s never lost samples. I use my power strips to shut down a bunch of gear at once, like monitors and interfaces and outboard but I always turn the DT off with the built in switch. I figured that there might be a few background processes related to saving which happen at shut down once the power switch is flipped, like a soft shutdown, and I didn’t want to interrupt those processes (if there are any).
@Hawk I believe there are some save issues that can occur from shutting down the unit with a power strip. This problem, for me, though, pre-dates my use of a power strip to shut down the unit. It also doesn’t make sense to me that projects that are not open at the time of shutdown would be erased by shutting down with a power strip, but that could very well be what’s happening.
You should stop using the strip full stop, spend an hour and bang out a few beats, then see if it still happens. If Elektron has only heard one other report ever of it happening, then it’s probably some kind of user error issue versus a super rare hardware problem, not to say that it couldn’t be, but odds are… Are you on 1.11 (not 1.11 beta)?
Oh also what is the naming scheme of the samples that are disappearing? Post file names of a few samples that you’ve chopped up, saved to DT, and then have gone missing. Are they long and strange? Are you using strange characters? Just post up a few examples.
That’s a good suggestion. I’m really looking for any kind of user error I may be making. If I follow your suggestion, it may be a long time before I am able to see what has disappeared. As I’ve mentioned, samples will be there for several weeks, survive multiple sessions, and then disappear at random when I am not even working on the project. They’re just gone when I reopen the file. The OS I am using is 1.11.
I’m not saving samples with random names. They tend to have names like kick1, snare3, Cchord, etc. It’s hard to say what would be the exact names of the files that have disappeared. They’re just not there anymore. For example, I’ll open a session, and pad 1, which is set to trigger sample slot 17, will make no sound. Sample slot 17 is empty, and there is no sign of anything having been there. It was probably called kick1, or something like that.
Now here’s a question - if I am recording samples, chopping them, and naming them things like kick1, kick2, etc… Will that overwrite samples in other projects that are similarly named? Say, for example, project 1 has samples named kick1 and kick2. I go to record in project 12, and I record separate samples, each named kick1 and kick2. Will that overwrite kick1 and kick2 in project 1?
Negative, it won’t, the DT looks at the data of the sample in a sophisticated way and duped names don’t trick it. You should probably be giving unique names to your samples though to keep the workflow nice, but that’s just my suggestion and unrelated. I don’t really know what could be causing the issue, I’m basically just asking questions to cause you to post info about the samples or workflow or whatever that may tip off a smarter or better informed person. How are you chopping and transferring the samples? Describe the workflow in detail. Or, if you don’t want to type up a list, shoot a little video of the workflow.
I too have no idea what is missing, I save stuff so I don’t have to remember. After going through all the project slots and applying each sample to the pattern data without a match I can confirm that the samples have definitely gone and not been moved, the sample slot of each missing track is always relocated at the end of the list. I had been hoping it was some kind of duplicate name problem that could be avoided but it sounds like that is not possible.
I shall do some more tests when motivated but it feels like anything I record recently has a high chance of disappearing after saving, i have so many new patterns with 2-3 or even 4 samples missing and they are always the meat of the pattern.
@digimatt sounds like we have the same problem. Makes it really discouraging to put any time into a project that will disappear without warning. Elektron is sending me an RMA so I can return the digitakt and an expert can take a look at it. I’ll keep you guys updated on what they find. Their last guess was that the CPU is not writing successfully and may need to be replaced. I’m not sure that’s it, but I will let you guys know what they find.
@Hawk I can’t imagine I’m doing anything unusual. I record samples directly into the inputs, chop them, name the files, assign them to a track. I save the project. I spend hours editing and sequencing the samples. Several days or weeks later, they are gone when I open the project. I am not using the samples in other projects or diving into the drive to erase files. Again, this happened most recently with an extended MIDI sequence I had programmed. I am moving towards removing the digitakt from my workflow entirely because of this massive issue. It’s like picking up a guitar and finding all of the strings are missing. I won’t keep reaching for that guitar if I have to start over every time I want to play it.
Yeah that’s definitely not good, very frustrating and I can’t see that you’re doing anything weird. Better to have Elektron get their hands dirty investigating especially if it will help other users potentially.
Have you tried elk-herd yet? That will let you inspect what samples are associated with each project. It won’t recover missing samples of course but it might let you inspect what’s going on in a different way.
I have the same issue, Some samples missing when reopen the digitakt a day later, but my missing samples are between others, only see – insteat of the sample. But I think it’s my fault, I record samples and I think I put the same name to the new recorded samples as the samples that disapeared today. Are you shure we can use different samples with the same name? In my case are all in the same project, only different banks.
Hey all. This is probably something easy I just missed before, but here’s an extra way to save samples. If you hit FUNC […] you will get to a menu where you can ‘export sound.’ From there, you can categorize it and save it to your sound library. This is great if you’re making kits / categorizing sounds that you can use in other projects. You can then import those sounds from the sound library into new projects using the same menu.
I don’t know if this is going to change the disappearing samples, and still not sure if that is just something I have been messing up, but this seems like a good extra precaution.