Hi everybody. I bought a used A4 this summer, and really fell in love with it. I’ve made an album’s worth of music, all saved to my midi-synced Elektron boxes, and I’m finally ready to record it. I’ve been just running my A4 and Model:samples into a mixer with the outputs going into a Scarlett to record into Ableton as one big raw track. However, I think I want to use overbridge for the Analog. It’s currently not working and i realized the issue was I am running OS1.4. I’m all ready to upgrade, but I wanted to make sure upgrading to 1.5 in order to use Overbridge isn’t going to bite me in the ass. If I upgrade the system, it won’t delete anything from my saved project, right? Also, I just drop the upgrade file into transfer while the A4 is waiting on the OS upgrade menu? Trying to figure this out and very concerned about inadvertently deleting work I currently have saved, or screwing it up in some other unforeseen way. Anyway, thank you all so much for the help!!
Firstly - irrespective of how robust or risk free the process you should back up anything you’d hate to lose - something like C6 if you can or another sysex backup utility.
In all the updates i have performed and that others have too, it’s never happened, if you’re methodical, nothing should go wrong to your creations, be sure to save working progress etc
Dropping the firmware on a connected machine in Transfer may not even need you to be in the correct place ‘waiting’ - it would for doing so via C6, but i think it’s more automated/streamlined these days
backup, then update even though it’s all very robust
I ran into an issue where patterns that utilize the track scale feature were reset to the default 1/1 setting, but that was patched in a recent update, so I don’t think it would be an issue, but obviously better to know than not know.
Also, whatever you do, back that thing up.
Okay great thanks a ton. Dug around and found the 2013 version of c6 - this will work fine with an A4 MKII, right?
Yeah it’s just a means to get SysEx to the A4. You could use plenty of other tools, but C6 works well so long as you don’t have the latest Mac OS (don’t know about Windows).
shit I do have the latest OS. any other ideas for backup? Or do you guys think u should just go for the update regardless
Definitely look at other sysex transfer software. I think Elektron have another called Transfer or just google search one that works with your computers OS. It doesn’t need to be specifically from Elektron, the A4 doesn’t care.
Use SysEx Librarian if you can’t use the dedicated Elektron software.
How much is your stored work worth?
I have transfer. I was going to use that for the firmware update. I downloaded Sysex librarian and was able to back up my project to my computer. However, just to test it, I tried loading the sysex file from Librarian into a blank project slot to make sure it worked and I’m having trouble making that work.
To answer your question, this project is what I’ve spent the last 6 months of my life doing haha. So worth that time at least. I’d like to avoid a catastrophe
False alarm! Backup works with Sysex Librarian! Now onto OS1.5 and - ideally - Overbridge. Thank you all!