Elk-Herd 3.0

Elektron Gear
#107

It will only drain it if you’re using it though. You can cmd q once your done. Also its good to keep your laptop plugged in when doing any work because laptops often have battery modes which throttle performance when not connected to a power source

#108

I hear ya. I wish I didn’t even need to install an extra browser in my computer to do my Elektron hardware and music needs, seems redundant to me. It’s like adding a kitchen onto your house to clean your car.

1 Like
#109

It’s based on a spec that hasn’t been standardized yet and is still considered “experimental” for many browsers, hence the limit of options.

https://webaudio.github.io/web-midi-api/

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MIDIAccess#browser_compatibility

#110

True True!

#111

it would be great if it were also available for Android or iOS (app). Then I don’t need a laptop anymore.
then I could save all the samples on my phone and only load the samples that I need for the current project. I have more samples than there are on the Digitakt memory.:sweat_smile:

#112

I have a (not-so) quick question about saving patterns to a new project using elk-herd . . . how does it handle samples that are already in the project, but in a different slot?

Right now I have three different projects with some pattens I’d like to swap between them. But here’s the thing—while these patterns use about 90% the same samples, the projects don’t necessarily have them all in the same slots.

So, if I save a pattern from Project A to the new project, and then a pattern from Project B, is elk-herd smart enough to collate the samples in the new pattern with the ones that are already in the target project, but in different slots? And if so, does that include sample slot p-locks?

Or will the pattern from Project A be put all out of sorts because the pattern from Project B moved everything around in it?

As far as I remember, I don’t use the LFO to change the sample slot in any of these patterns. I know that in that case I’d have to keep them all in the same order.

Thanks! I love this software, it really changes the way I approach the instrument, and by this point it’s saved me whole weeks of drudgework.

#113

Update: I tried it out and so far everything’s worked great.

I fed elk-herd pattern after pattern from a whole pile of mismatched kits and shoddy version control, and it digested it all and spat out perfectly ordered projects for as long as I had the disk space.

Thank you so much for this fantastic resource!

1 Like
#114

You don’t have to use chrome all the time… you could just open chrome to use this app

1 Like
#115

So Elk Herd is friggin’ amazing and I thank you for it. I wish all the Elektron boxes had such a simple management interface for the computer. Any chance the Digitone is still in the pipeline for this thing?

4 Likes
#116

I hope Mark/mzero is ok. Looks like we’ve not heard from him for ages now. And yes, Elk-Herd is brilliant!

3 Likes
#117

I think he’s okay! I follow him on instagram for his music stuff and he’s still posting cool stuff regularly :slight_smile: (last one was 6 days ago!)
Just taking a break from here I guess :smiley:

If you ever see this @mzero, please if possible add a function to download all the samples in a project! :smiley:
I don’t know how many times I’ve tried to reverse engineer elk-herd to figure out which function is actually executed when I click “Get Sample File”. To then try and add that into the project page so I could select all samples and “Get Sample File” or better yet just have a button to get all samples on the project :smiley: But sadly the elm->javascript ‘compiler’ munges stuff enough that I can’t really make out how it fits together.
I was monitoring the midi and see that when I click “get sample file” the digitakt does spit out a big bit of sysex (i’m assuming that’s the sample formatted as sysex) and then I think you have something that converts the sysex into an actual wav. But that’s as far as I got :frowning:

1 Like
#118

I was under the impression that he was working on the samples for project feature, is that not the case?

Mzero could you confirm if you are or not?

1 Like
#119

Hiho!

I am okay… well, as okay as one can be after a year+ of “stay at home” during a pandemic… I can’t really point any one thing, but somehow the events of 2020 (COVID, racial tensions, politics) quickly took a toll on me, and I just had much less energy.

Many of my projects had to take a back seat so that I could continue to at least make some music. I did wrangle some emotional live streamed performances into a nice album - and got some other • new • work out. I did finally have to challenge myself to get back in the studio on a more steady basis… which I did… which felt good… and now I’ve got some new things coming and thinking about touring in 2022…

Now, as for elk-herd:

send back to DT issues:

This is the #1 bug and has been there for awhile. It seems to affect only a small number of configurations… and I still haven’t figured out the common issue here… Sorry!

features:

  • collect and save all - top feature we’d all like! Doable, but will take work.
  • batch rename - this would be nice… need to think about how the UI works… beyond that pretty easy
  • find unused samples on +Drive - very hard, though Elektron has said the APIs to make it possible are coming (there now?), in any event, this will be an intensive operation, as it will need to download every project on the unit. Again, UI for this will probably take some work, and the code will not be trivial.

machines:

  • Octotrack - not likely to ever be supported, but then again, there already is a nice octotrack editor: OctaEdit
  • Model:Samples, Analog Rythm (I & II) - these will currently work with elk-herd for sample managment. Project management would take a significant development work for each, as every machine has a different project structure and encoding.
  • Digitone - Same issue as project management for M:S and AR.

application:

elk-herd could only be turned into a stand-alone application by using one of the packages that turns web apps into stand-alone apps (like, Electron, ironically). However, this will make it large (as it basically just embeds the whole core of a browser into the stand-alone app), and make the build and deploy process much more onerous for me. I don’t plan to do it… but happy if anyone else does.

As noted by others above, elk-herd, will work with any browser that supports Web MIDI - which includes Chrome, Opera, and Edge (which is basically Chrome). It also works on the Android versions of those.

iOS is a bother because Apple won’t let anyone use any web rendering engine other than the Safari engine. So even Chrome, on iOS, is really the Safari engine under the hood, and Safari doesn’t support Web MIDI. Given the growing amount of Web MIDI things - and “configure your MIDI thing-a-ma-jig” web pages, I have no idea what Apple is thinking!

future plans:

Honestly, I’m still kind of wrapped up in all that I can handle right now, so I don’t expect must motion on elk-herd in the very near term… except…

It is time to open source the thing! So, in the next two months I intend to put the whole source up on github. I will continue to both maintain the “official” code line, and always run the latest of it on my servers for free. For those that might want to contribute to it - know that it is no small piece of code: It is about 15k lines of Elm code in over 70 files.

Peace,
— Mark

31 Likes
#120

thank you Legend.

3 Likes
#121

Wow Mark glad to hear you’re doing good! Completely agree and glad 2020 is behind us.

I spoke with elektron today and they are apparently working on a collect and save all feature for transfer itself and will use a proprietary file format and everything!!!
So I’m hoping this may result in an API to make things more usable.
On the OS front! That’s amazing news! Maybe time to sink teeth into a new language :slight_smile:

Thanks for all your amazing work!

3 Likes
The Digitone and Digitakt need some gosh darn software management programs - A rant
#122

Mark, you are a Scholar and a Gentleman.
Feelin’ you on the 2020 front, (but I haven’t been digging 2021 much either!),
your work and ingenuity do not go unappreciated, EH is just fantastic!
Much Love,
Yoni

2 Likes
#123

Awesome!

Now I got to look into Elm, seems pretty cool :slight_smile:

#124

Just as an FYI (I was curious myself), elk-herd seems to work just fine for OS version 1.21, at least as far as the things I’ve tested (sample send and get, moving samples around and renaming, project fetch and send).

Cheers on this fantastic tool.

1 Like
#126

As a FYI, for those allergic to chrome and google, Brave works fine with Elk-Herd 3.0 :slight_smile:

3 Likes
#127

I love your program to organice my Digitakt, I realised that is not working properly with the last 1.30 OS. When an upgrade?, pleaaase!!!

Thank you!!