Considering building a Mac companion app for Tonverk (card overview, health check, verified backups)

Elektron Gear Tonverk
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I got myself Tonvault, as it sounds like a useful helper. I’m running it on an Intel iMac (one of the last generation of Intel Macs - so it’s rather long in the tooth).

It identified some broken Multi-Samples, which was very useful. But having found a whole pile of samples (4992) that are worth converting to 48 kHz, clicking on the convert button seems to lock up the entire app. I have no idea how long to wait, as there is no progress bar or anything, just a semi-transparent blank rectangle overlaying the UI. I gave it an hour or so, then force quit. I am trying once more with the SD card out of the Tonverk and instead directly in the Mac. But any advice would be welcome.

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Convert it locally , entirely on a Mac .( copy it to a folder) instead of trying to do it on the file on the sd card / with the tonverk in disk mode

Copy the folder / multi file over … fix it , then copy it back onto the sd cards

Is this a tonverk factory multi file that’s broken ?

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Cheers - I will do that

Not a factory multi file. One I found while searching for interesting Tonverk content a couple of days ago - nothing to worry about, I think

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@bengersfood Thank you for buying it, and thank you for writing this up properly. You found a real bug, and force quitting was the right call.

You were not doing anything wrong, and it was not your Mac being old. I went looking, and the conversion itself was never the slow part. On my machine 300 files convert in well under a second, so 4,992 should be seconds rather than an hour. What actually locked up was the window that lists them. It built every single row before showing you anything, on the same thread that draws the interface, so with almost five thousand files it sat there doing layout work while looking completely dead. The blank rectangle you saw was the app waiting on itself.

On top of that, nothing told you what was happening. The conversion engine has always counted its way through the files, but the window was throwing that count away instead of showing it, so there was no bar, no number, and no way to stop it. That is squarely my fault and it is the part that turned a slow operation into an unusable one.

All three are fixed now. The list only builds the rows you can actually see, the plan behind it is worked out once in the background instead of being rebuilt every time the window redraws, and you get a real count with a Stop button. If you stop it partway, the files that finished are finished and stay where they are, and the rest are simply left alone. Nothing on your card is touched either way.

It is in the next update, which I will get into review shortly. I will post here when it is out.

In the meantime @re5et is right, and it is worth doing anyway. Copying the folder to your Mac first and pointing TonVault at that will be considerably faster than reading everything over the Tonverk in disk mode, whatever the app is doing.

One thing that would help me, if you have a moment. Roughly how large are those 4,992 files together, and was the card in the Tonverk over USB when you first tried it? I want to be sure I have found all of it rather than just the part I could reproduce.

Glad the health check earned its keep on the broken multi-samples in the meantime.

1 Like
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Thanks for the very clear reply, and for what sounds like a sensible update.

The first time I tried, I was using the card in the Tonverk via USB; the second time, directly in the Mac. After that, I copied the files to my hard disk and dealt with things piecemeal, copying over to an external disk (as the app did not want to copy to the same physical disk - I guess it “saw” it as a single SD card). Even then, when I was dealing with converting a very large collection of one-shot samples, there was a similar apparent 'lock-up".

As for the size of the original body of files, I can no longer be sure, but it was big … 11+ GB of multis and a large collection of one-shots and wavetables on top of that

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@bengersfood That settles it, thank you. It locking up again with the files already on your hard disk rules out USB, so it was the app on any disk.

The disk thing was not what it looked like. TonVault refuses to write copies inside the folder it is scanning, so the originals stay untouched, and that rule stays. The message was just wrong: it told you to pick a folder on your Mac when you were already there. It now says the destination has to be outside the folder being scanned, so somewhere alongside is fine and the external drive was never needed.

The progress and Stop update is in review. The wording fix follows just behind.

Your 11 GB is larger than anything I had tested against, which is likely why you found this. I would be glad to hear how it goes once the update is out.

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I doubt I will ever process so large a bulk of files again. In the few days before my Tonverk arrived I got over excited and downloaded a LOT of content…

Thank you for the speedy updates

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1.2.0 is out.

@bengersfood The conversion freeze is fixed. The window now builds only the rows you can see, works out the plan in the background instead of redoing it on every redraw, and shows a real count with a Stop button. Stopping keeps the files that already finished. Backups and verification show their progress too, and duplicate detection is quicker on cards with many same-sized samples.

Thank you for the report. Nearly five thousand files at once was well past anything I had tested, and all three causes came out of your description.

The wording fix for the destination message is in the next update.

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I will hope to try it out this weekend. Many thanks