Digitakt Sample Management

Elektron Gear Digitakt
#21

From what I can tell, every time a project is opened, it grabs the designated audio files from the +Drive and loads them into RAM (aka the project’s sample menu). It doesn’t seem to matter if the audio was loaded directly from the project’s sample menu or from saved sounds in the Sound Browser.

Is there really no way to save a sample TO a project, so even if you delete audio file from the +Drive, the project can always find the sample in its own project folder?

If not, how do I clear up space on my +Drive without messing up my saved projects? It is bad enough that I have to take detailed notes every time I want to free up space in RAM (since there is no indication of what samples are used aside from manually checking them one by one, including LFOs and P-Locks). Would I need to execute the same process for +Drive file management? Is there a desktop app that can help?

Everything on the Digitakt is fast and inspiring, but this file management dilemma has me (surprisingly) missing my Octatrack.

P.S. I like the idea of only loading samples that truly NEED to be on the device, and that’s how I would like to work moving forward, but first I need to clean up after my first few months of experimenting and learning the DT, and I would like to clean up with out throwing away the handful of good patterns I made along the way, especially since the DT patterns work within a larger composition/set involving other devices, not just the DT.

Any help or recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

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#22

If you delet it from the +drive it’s gone.

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#23

Thanks for the quick answer. I would appreciate if anyone could share techniques on how to work around this limitation to re-organize files on the DT without breaking projects. Maybing making my own project folders on the +Drive could help.

Unless there is some sort of magical software or workflow out there, it seems like only realistic option is to take detailed notes an tediously rearrange files in such a way not to mess anything up.

#24

As of now this seem to be the safest option. Addition to project folders I also have my own ‘pemanent’ folder with the sounds I tend to use a lot.

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#25

You could prefix an underscore or other symbol (like an ‘!’ etc) to sample names used in a project or Sound, but still that’s a bit tedious. Once used in many places, it’ll be difficult to know for sure when you want to take the prefix away if you think it is no longer used anywhere.

  • A sample that is used in a Sound or a pattern can be renamed or moved and still work as intended. This is due to a hash function that adds a file specific value to every file, and this value is independent of the file name or the file’s location in the data structure. However, if you delete a sample, it will not be included in any Sounds or patterns anymore.

It would be far handier that the Digitakt prefixed automatically

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#26

Hmmm, but the plus side is, once I figure out what samples I am using in projects and sounds, I don’t have to worry about rearranging them within the +Drive because of the hash function will always ensure that they are found, correct ?

#27

yep - I expect it might be possible to send a sysex dump of all projects, analyse the sysex using a script for the hashes identifying the samples … but then how to correspond those hashes back to the sample names to create a ‘do not delete list’?

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#28

This was a great way to describe this, thank you, that helped me.

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#29

I thought I’d give a current update:

Recap

Just to recap the DT structure, and be sure we are all on the same page:

  1. Samples - actual waveform data - is stored in a directory tree on the +Drive - You’re limited only by the 1GB of +Drive.

  2. Sounds - are a reference to a sample, and the settings of the SRC, FLTR, AMP, and LFO pages.

  3. Projects - contain the patterns (with trig data), one sound for each audio track, a sound pool containing upto 128 other sounds, and the all important sample pool, which is a list of 127 references to samples. Every sample referenced in the track sounds and in the sound pool must be included in the sample pool.
    .
    When a project is loaded (so you can play it), all the samples referenced from the sample pool are loaded from the +Drive into memory, and this total can’t exceed 64MB.

  4. Projects and sounds can also be stored in the +Drive, in their own areas (not a directory tree).

Sample Pool Management

The first thing most people run into is running out of space in a project’s sample pool. You tend to load up whole kits to experiment with - but in the end use only one or two sounds from it. It is easy to fill up the 127 slots.

On the device, there is no way to find which slots are unused by any pattern in the project. It’s not even all that easy to find what patterns are free. If you do clear or reused a sample slot, there is no way to “close up the gap” in the list, or anyway to rearrange them.

elk-herd 3.0 (see: Elk-herd 3.0 beta: Project Import at last! ) will let you do all this using the Chrome browser on your computer.

Sound Pool Management

A project’s sound pool is only used for p-locking sounds to a trig. They are used far less often by most people, but suffer all the same management headaches as the sample pool … it’s just less acute. Again, elk-herd will help you.

Note: Using the sound browser while not holding down a trig button does something totally different: This lets you browse the sounds on the +Drive sound area, and if you select one - resets the current track’s sound settings to a copy of that. This does not affect the sound pool at all. If the copied sound references a sample not already in the project’s sample pool, it will be added.

Sample Management

The device itself has a +Drive sample browser and the normal file management operations. Both Elektron’s Transfer software, and elk-herd offer computer based view with easier interface for these operations, and offer sample upload and download.

The problem comes from knowing if any of the samples on the +Drive are referenced by any sample pool in any project (the project in memory, or the ones in the +Drive project area), or are referenced by any sound (again in any project, or in the +Drive sound area). No tool can currently do this.

The +Drive has a feature that a given sample cannot be in the +Drive twice: If you take a favorite kick sample, and load it in place in the +Drive with the rest of the kit it came from - can’t load it again in different directory, even if you rename it. This is a standard feature of Elektron devices.

It is both good and bad: Good in that you can move a sample around on the +Drive, and all the sound and project references will stay hooked up to it. This will even work if you completely remove the sample, and then later re-transfer it to the Digitakt (assuming it is exactly the same sample data).

However, if you are managing sets of smaller samples - you might be willing to expend the +Drive space to have duplicates of the exact same sample so that you can keep them ordered by project or other organization. Alas, you can’t.

Future

I assume that Elektron will continue to improve Transfer, but I have no idea what management features they’ll be adding.

elk-herd 3.0 has project backup/restore and project merging (import) functionality. 3.1 will feature a “project+samples” backup and restore option: Backup will create a zip file of the project, and a copy of all the samples it references (except the factory samples). Laster, you can restore this zip file, which will load any missing samples back into the +Drive, and load the project into the Digitakt.

I would love to add the ability to find unused samples on the +Drive, but there are some difficult design issues, and currently the Digitakt OS doesn’t let me get at +Drive projects.

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Digitakt Sound Pool / +Drive / Per Track samples confusion
#30

Thank you so much for that detailed and structured documentation (and for the awesome elk herd project). My Idea before reading your post was to duplicate all samples used on the +Drive and save the duplicates in project specific folders. This would still be achievable if you resample all samples in a project. But that sound painful. Your planned update would help a lot.