Transfer App; Unable to Transfer Folders

Elektron Gear Digitakt
#1

In the past I have used the transfer app to send a whole folder (containing subfolders of samples) across to the DT.

Today on 3 computers (Mac&PC), I am unable to drag a whole folder in. I have to select the individual files, and then (but not going to) go through the labor intensive task of creating a directory structure via the DT tools.

I know (fingers crossed for the start of feb), Overbridge is not far away and should eliminate my problem, but wondered if anyone else has experienced similar.

#2

No problem here, on PC windows 10.

I don’t drag in folders anymore, only content, because it creates a folder anyway with a date that I rename.
Dragging a whole folder creates a subfolder, that I couldn’t get rid of.

#3

I have solved the issue. I did not mention in my OP that I was trying MP3’s.

The Transfer app will let you transfer MP3, but only as individual files. You can’t try to fool it either by placing them in a folder with wav or aiff.

Shame as I had spent the week compressing my best sample library with audacity. (4.4 gig to 300MB) and had it all organised nicely in folders.

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#4

ive assumed that whatever you download to digitakt gets turned into 44k 16bit mono wav equivalent , though i havent checked.

so it’ll help save space on pc , maybe not on DT.
i’d be interested to hear if that is the case if you can compare mp3 / on DT usage.

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#5

The transfer app converts the files to the format of the digitakt. 16 bit, 48 kHz, mono is the format and someone mentioned in another thread that it’s 96kb per second of audio.

2 Likes
#6

Thanks for the replies.

I thought the app just converted everything to mono, didn’t realise it adjusted the sample rate as well.

Oh well glad I posted, as there is no need to continue with converting my sounds.

#7

(“someone mentioned”… that was probably me!)

Just to gather everything into one spot:

  • The samples on the Digitakt are only stored as 48kHz x 16bit mono.

  • Samples use up 96kB (bytes) per second. There is some additional overhead per file, but it is small enough to ignore.

  • Transfer will convert what it can to this format - so no point in converting your files to some other, more compressed format (like MP3) - you’ll just lose fidelity.

  • It might make sense to convert your samples to mono yourself. Transfer uses only the left channel of a stereo sample. You may prefer to the right, or the sum, or perhaps some other mix… it will depend on the samples.

  • From some limited testing, the sample rate conversion that Transfer does looks reasonable.

One other thing to be aware of:

  • Transfer (1.0.0) does not handle character sets correctly (at least on Mac). As a consequence, if you transfer samples or directories with names that aren’t ASCII (Latin, unaccented characters, digits, some simple symbols) either:

    a) the name will be mangled, or
    b) transfer will just silently refuse to transfer it

  • Be especially aware of dashes. For example, the folder name:

    Bobeats – Sonic Treats Volume 2

    when transferred on a Mac will end up on the Digitakt as:

    Bobeats – Sonic Treats Volume 2

    This is because that dash in the name isn’t a simple hyphen (-), but a nice long em-dash (—), which isn’t ASCII. Pity, because that charater does exist on the Digitakt, just Transfer does the wrong thing.

(Technical Details: The OS supplies UTF-8 Unicode, the Digitakt uses Windows-1252 encoding, Transfer doesn’t transcode and so the UTF-8 bytes get interpreted on the Digitakt as Windows-1252.)

Updated to include information on stereo to mono conversion. Thanks @Open_Mike & @jcd.

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#8

Yeah the someone was you. Didn’t want to keep linking you everywhere though, I know I’ve done that a bunch recently. That can get annoying, I’m guessing.

You’re always dropping great digitakt related knowledge.

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#9

It’s been verified here that it actually just takes the Left channel:

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#10

Hey all!

I noticed that if you drag a folder of .aif samples into Elektron Transfer, it will not accept them. To copy them over to the device, you can only select all .aif files in that folder and then drag and drop them that way. Which is a bit tedious especially if you have many folders of samples. You will also need to manually put them in folders on the device, if you want to keep them arranged like they were.

This is not the case for .wav files - you can drag and drop folders with .wav files into Transfer just fine.

I hope this gets fixed in the next update of the app!

#12

Try Renaming them to .aiff

#13

Nope, renaming .aif to .aiff doesn’t work either.

#14

.aiff files and file structures don’t work properly with Transfer, in fact it’s a disaster trying to use them, unless you’re only transferring one sample at a time - when I got my ARmk2 and DT, I went through a day of head scratching and annoyance until I worked out that the files needed to be .wav, then I had no problem at all, worked like a charm. In fact, the best way is to batch convert your files to .wav in 16bit 48khz if you want things to be hassle free.
Cheers

#15

Yeah I can surely work around that by batch-converting the files. But I posted here mainly to report this as a bug.

#16

Dears, anyone has experience with digitone? I can’t let communicate via USB with Macbook. A4 and Digitakt are OKAY