Bad comparison. Syntakt and digitone are transferring very small amounts of data, digitakt is transferring data plus (relatively speaking) much larger audio files.
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Let’s do some comparisons to get a feel for “speed” and what not.
Say we want to send a 10 megabyte sample file to the Digitakt2:
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Using standard midi the speed is 31.25kB/s at most, so out 10 megabytes will take about 40 minutes.
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Using Elektron “turbo” midi you get about 10 times the speed of standad Midi so our 10 megabytes will be transfered in slightly over 4 minutes. (This was quite an achievement back in the day.)
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Using Elektron Transfer application people here seem to be getting around 280 kB/s since 10 megabytes takes about 35 seconds.
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If you sample on the Digitakt 2 (at 16 bit 48kHz stereo) after 1 minute and about 17 seconds you have yourself a 10 megabyte sample file.
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On my Macbook when transfering 10 megabytes to my external SSD-drive it takes aproximately 15 milliseconds.
Everything is relative, but the sample transfer speeds for Digitakt2 does need some love in my humble opinion. Come on Elektron let some wild Swedish engineering loose on the data transfer features!
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Transfer app converts almost any audio on the fly, part of why it takes longer. Better than getting unsupported file errors like I do on my SP-404 mkII and MPC.
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It’s not a bad comparison. All 3 boxes were transferring update files of similar sizes with the digitakt running 10x slower than the other two.
Transferring audio files to the digitakt 2 is a tediously slow process by modern standards.
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Yes, that’s true, the sample transfer app does more things than just data transfer. And stability is also something that is very important, even more so when the transfer speeds are slow.
While I agree, there is absolutely nothing stable about the Transfer app, sample transfers fail constantly, especially downloads. I’ve had to switch to Elkherd just to get basic samples in & out
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My experience has been the exact opposite. While it’s slow as can be, I appreciate that it always works and I never have any issues with it if I set up a big upload and walk away. Not saying you’re not running into issues or anything, just that it’s not universal for everyone.
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Slow speeds seem to be a theme with Elektron, as someone who often changes samples on their Digitakt II it really is a pain, I don’t really understand the change to a 20gb drive if its going to take 5-8 hours to fill like half of that drive with samples, not to mention stability is basically not a thing with the Elektron Transfer tool & the linux app I use “Elektroid” (used the 1st party transfer tool before I switched to Linux). I have to babysit the upload basically any time I am uploading more than 500mb of files or any files that may be longer than 20s/5-10mb in size as it will often crash for no reason and with no log of what it last did.
Ontop of all that, it took Elektron almost 2 months to fix my Digitakt II’s broken screen (ended up with one of the defective units) with little to no communication about what was going on with it, it quite literally just showed up to my door 7 weeks after I sent it to them, no email with tracking, no updates on the repairs etc etc.
I want to love Elektron and the Digitakt II I have but it becomes really hard with the two examples above.
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