Hello friends, I’ve come to the unfortunate time where I’ve filled up my +Drive with samples that are basically all used in the songs I’ve programmed on it. So I’ve got a few questions…
Can we really not put in a bigger +Drive? I’m possibly even willing to create some sort of script that formats a drive the correct way that Elektron wants it, for compatibility.
Barring that, what are your best ideas for creating new stuff while still being able to access old songs if necessary?
The best way I’ve come up with is: take all the wavs on the digitakt, zip them up, delete all the ideas you’ll never complete from the projects, and just unzip and swap out all the samples once you want to access them again.
…really good question…
as far as i know…the +drive is hardwired…so no chance for exchanging i’m afraid…
transfer can backup for u…that’s for sure…so one folder on ur desktop and transfer as the harbour between these two destinations should work…
project files don’t eat up much space…the audio files do…so killing any meta data won’t free much space but can cause lot’s of trouble, once missing…i guess…
I haven’t used it yet, and sadly am not sure if it can be trusted as of yet, but does (or could) Total Recall include samples?
As Elk Herd progresses, hopefully this will become manageable. It is a huge issue. I had to zero out my +drive a month after purchase because I wasn’t aware of just how difficult this was to deal with, and how particular I needed to become with my samples. Sadly, it hinders the use of the device in one very important way: I sometimes decide against adding samples of even reasonable size if I’m unsure if it will sound good where I want to try it because I know that unless I try and clean it up immediately, I won’t know if it’s vital to a project and will be stuck with it taking up space until the next time I have to clean house, and next time it will be near impossible.
At the very least It would be nice if these devices included a card reader/writer that can store +drive images, but a better solution would be…better.
Try elk herd.
It can identify used and unused samples within an active project. Quite nice for cleaning up things. Maybe it’ll help you clear some space.
The +drive is a chip on the mainboard with its size fixed in hardware (address lanes) and the firmware (hardcoded). So no easy drive swapping. Don’t think of it like a normal hard drive, but like built-in flash memory.
For anyone interested in some details about the hardware internals of the Digitakt:
Thanks all. I might just go with my original idea of zipping up the current incarnation of my drive and swapping it back in when I need to, which is the path of least resistance.
It’s such a shame, because it’s by far the largest limitation with the Digitakt, especially with the price of storage these days.
Prices for storage media are low but from a programmer´s point of view the problem is how to address the stuff that you stored. Remember the file size limits in older OS like MS Dos or Windows 3.11? Larger drives were available at the time but the OS was not able to use all of it. I guess that the Elektron Machines use rather simple (as in fast) OS and as a result the total storage is limited.
I think it’s because they buy SOC’s in bulk with a fixed Flash storage. Don’t know if it’s bespoke, as the size of the +Drive has never changed, or just a coincidence that it’s 1GB.
Seems an easy upgrade for a MK2 to come with an SD card slot and do away with the +Drive - or just not use it!!! - No reason to complicate the supply chain and support. Actually, such a thing should be possible with the current hardware, since it has a USB controller. With some internal rewiring, an SD slot with a USB interface could be installed. Then you just need a firmware update with the necessary software support. Likely load performance would improve with fast cards -
there is no advantage to using the +Drive despite it being soldered on - the chip itself seems to be butt slow. The whole approach is very Nintendo-like … “lateral thinking using withering technology”.
It may be a bit redundant in this thread, but at the moment I am in the process of converting all my long-form samples (basically anything other than one-shots) to +24 semitones in Audacity, and replacing them on the Digitakt. The only thing I need to do, is to go through a few projects and reselect the corresponding sample and pitch it down 2 octaves. This will reduce the file size of these longer samples to 25%.
One idea to cleanup some space could be:
1 - For any project remove the unused samples from the pool so that the pool contains only used samples
2 - Backup the projects using Transfer
3 - Cleanup the +Drive completely
4 - Restore the projects using Transfer with the option that put the samples in a the project folder
Doing this way you should end up with less samples, the projects that still playing correctly and some space for new samples.
