Octatrack - What am I missing when saving a Project?

Elektron Gear Octatrack
#1

Hello!

I have had my Octatrack for a year now and love it. I use it in a pretty “simple” fashion for live sampling, mangling, looping, and midi clocking an external sequencer. I generally don’t even save the captured samples, but I like to have my overall settings saved (such as machines used, midi settings, scenes, etc.).

I know the machine auto-saves and I have never had an issue when turning it off and on and finding everything where it should be. HOWEVER, on a whim I decided to formally SAVE my active project (via FUNCTION + MIXER --> PROJECT --> SAVE] and when it was complete, I had lost all of my settings and the project was back to where it would have been when newly created (possibly?). I understand that this could have happened if I selected RELOAD, but why when selecting SAVE?

The manual clearly states “In general you should save a project once you are satisfied with it.” What am I missing?

Thanks!

#2

https://www.elektronauts.com/t/projects-no-reload-after-save-to-new/16342/19

OT is strange in lots of its aspects, and the “save stuff” is one of them…

I still have hard times to get it, and still sometimes loose my head around :wink:

#3

Weird, that shouldn’t have happened. Quick overview:

the OT autosaves everything* in a secret save on the fly. This means you can turn off and on and most** things will be as you left them if you turn on and off without doing a manual save

In addition to this, when you manually save the project, you create a checkpoint save that you can return to at any point by loading the project. This save is separate from the autosave. Erasing stuff is definitely not the intended functionality. However:

.* only the last edited part will be saved by the autosave or even the manual project save. so you 100% must remember to manually save all your parts before switching off. Again, not even manual project save works for parts, they must be saved also. This is one of those crazy quirks of the OT that is completely unintuitive, but there you go.

One quirk that’s maybe slightly more intuitive is that on power off all the recording buffers are wiped. You could definitely argue that flex samples are stored in ram but are still stored after switching off, so why not buffers? but no, buffers are volatile, it’s best to save it asap if you want to keep it, even if naming and assigning feels like a hassle. it’s really easy to rearm a oneshot rec trig by mistake and erase a nice recording buffer that you’d planned on keeping.

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#4

Thanks, Anfim!

I do think this is related to Parts which I honestly have never paid attention too just because of how I use the OT. Like I said, “simple” as I’m doing everything live based on new samples that are captured from what my band mate is doing. I’m going to look into understanding parts better, however. I just read that incredible white paper by Merlin called “Some Thoughts on Elektron’s Octatrack” and my head is spinning with ideas. I knew I had not been using the OT near to it’s potential (mostly because it’s used in an improv context so I don’t worry about pre arranging patterns, locks, certain samples or slices, etc.), but I think I’m going to go a bit deeper. From what I understand now, the stuff I was lost after the save would definitely have been defined as attributes of a Part.

I was aware of the recording buffers being wiped on power off so whenever I have caught something that is very cool, i do save the sample and assign it to a free flex slot. So far I have never re-used anything, but you never know.

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#5

I cant believe I did it somehow again.
I’ve had my Octa for atleast 2 years now and thought I’d mastered the saving process but I did a project reload and lost alot of stuff (not a big deal).
I save, sync to card, save bank, whatever .
So first I will update to latest os, then go thru and sort out my samples and start from scratch.
Its almost as if the “4 parts per bank” theory isn’t right. When I start a new bank, it has the previous part loaded. I think I’m a bit muddled up. Have to re-read thru the magical Merlins guide again.

Something else I will try is to always leave the first 8 flex and static slots empty. This way when you start a new bank all tracks should be emty (I think octa auto asigns track 1 to slot1 and so on). I will report back on this theory.

#6

“Something else I will try is to always leave the first 8 flex and static slots empty. This way when you start a new bank all tracks should be emty (I think octa auto asigns track 1 to slot1 and so on). I will report back on this theory.”

Interesting because I realised that the first 8 slots of Flex and Statics slots are not affected by PURGE SAMPLES option. So you’re theory can be reported soon!

#7

Hmmm (strokes beard) interesting.
Give me a few days. I’ll get back to you.

#8

For info, on the Cf card, the .work files are the auto-save files and the .strd (stored?) are the saved files. The project.strd and project.work files are identical when you just saved the project.

In these files I succeeded to copy a list of samples from another project to merge it.
It may be the same principle on OctaEdit.

#9

You need to save your Parts.

#10

I do save parts. My guess is user error.
I think I may have messed with the pool.

And leaving the first 8 slots blank works! But I cant test Purge samples for you.

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#11

I know this is an old thread, but just a quick Q regarding this and Mkii. Is hitting [FUNC] + Proj ( Save ) the same as SYNC TO CARD or are they different? I’m hesitant to update to 1.31 until I know for sure. Thanks yall

Is hitting [FUNC] + Proj ( Save ) the same as SYNC TO CARD or are they different?
#12

“Sync to card” is like on Windows/Linux the “safely remove device” or “eject” functionality. It makes sure everything got really written to the card (and isn’t still in any internal write buffer).

So “No” it is in no way a kind of save functionality, but should be performed after you saved something and want to remove the card.

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#13

wow thats good to know! So I’ve had the OT since June, so I should go back to every project and sync to card (and back up on comp) before putting in my 64gb sandisk?

#14

No. It’s just a temporary thing immediately after writing. To speed up the writing process almost every device utilizes some kind of internal buffer (in RAM). It may tell you it has completed a save even if there is still data left in this buffer which may be transferred to the card asynchronously later.

Under normal instances this is no problem, but when you want to remove the card the “sync to card” feature is required as safe guard (it examines the buffer to check if everything got really transfered to the card).

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#15

ahhhh gotcha, so couldn’t hurt to do it anyway. Thanks mate

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#16

Maybe someone said this before but make sure you save your recordings to the CF card before you turn off your machine or else when you turn it back on the recordings will be gone , everything else seems to stay in the RAM for me when I turn my unit back on. Hope this helps someone I lost a lot of recording data when I first got this machine.

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#17

How do you save a part? :wink:

#18

p53

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#19

Thank you! Rusty! Is this the answer to saving Patterns with different Machine settings and related samples?
I’m sooo at a loss…I’ve made several interesting patterns with different machines and samples assigned to tracks, every time I save a new pattern, the previous pattern inherits the last sample slot settings and I lose everything, it is driving me nuts. I’ve programmed, Akai, Kurzweil…Ableton, Sunhouse, KAT, Mandala…soo many obscure instruments, but this?!? I also, understand the AKeys, and aRYTM…just don’t get why this is so difficult.

#20

Remember that those settings are not per-pattern but per-part and parts are linked to, not part of the patterns. If you change settings in a part that is also used by a previous pattern then those changes will affect that pattern too.

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