Got Syntakt yesterday! Transfer not working/endlessly refreshing?

[Milkman]

Hello – I am super excited to have just received my Syntakt and Ive spent many hours reading and learning. Ive gotten to the point where I want to use the Transfer application to send a free Syntakt sound pack to the device – I downloaded the “Team Machines” pack and followed the instructions on installation.

However I havent been able to get a stable list of “Sounds” from the Syntakt since using the Transfer app to connect. The “refreshing” circular arrows are always turning, and when I hover over the refresh symbol I see the popup “number of active requests: 135”. This number slowly changes, such as 117, 120, 135, etc. It never finishes and I dont know what “active requests” it would be doing?

Each bank, when clicked, shows random sounds. What I mean is, when I click bank A, sometimes I see the contents of bank E. Bank E looks like bank B. Etc etc. As I click into each bank, I see different lists each time.

I cant upload any new sounds, and I cant even see which bank has space in it. Ive shut down the Transfer app, reset the Syntakt, and as soon as it reconnects to the app it starts to refresh endlessly again. I am on firmware 1.21.

Has anyone seen this? I cant seem to manage Syntakt via Transfer right now, and this seems like a big problem.

EDIT: this is weird, but it eventually stopped saying "active requests: " and began responding normally again. It took like 30-45 minutes, and then just… stopped. Now I can add/remove sounds and content and things seem normal. Not sure why this happened?

I think I solved it/it solved itself, lol.

[Milkman]

Was this normal behavior that I should have expected? Anyone else also experience this? I wouldnt know as this forum seems fairly dead. Should I send a support ticket for this, and also for the horizontal banding on my OLED screen? Maybe I will have to make tickets.

[shigginpit]

Any time my digitakt or digitone hasn’t connected to transfer (endless looping refresh arrow) if I power off the PC then turn it back on, transfer connects immediately. I’m not sure about the additional behavior you’re describing though.

Banding on the screen? like some faint and some not so faint ghosting lines across the OLED? I think that it usually indicates screen burn-in, it’s a problem with OLED that have been inactive and left on for too long but there are a few threads about this being an issue with the Syntakt screen so it depends on the cause.

If you bought it through Elektron directly, probably asking in a support ticket wouldn’t hurt. If you bought it through an online retailer, I’d probably contact them and send a picture of the issue and ask if it’s covered through their warranty, it won’t go away on it’s own.

If I’m misinterpreting what you mean by horizontal banding, then disregard the last part.

[Milkman]

The first time I connected Transfer it did this, and I had not initiated any file transfer. I had to turn off the Syntakt and shut down Transfer, then start them both again. The second time it worked, but this alarmed me. Thank you for replying!

This is a brand new Syntakt that has maybe 5 hours of use, and was purchased at Sweetwater. It turns out there is also a large thread about this in another area of the forum that I just found. If this winds up being RMA’ed, Sweetwater will be doing the RMA. I mentioned making a ticket because I wasnt sure if anyone was watching this area of the forum and I wanted to make sure I was doing this the right way.

Syntakt screen issues

I purchased a Syntakt at the end of October. Great machine, love it, but it developed a serious screen issue after a week or so, the screen flipped out and showed nasty black and white horizontal lines, like the horizontal pixels had stopped working in places or just displaying the wrong tones. Took it back to the shop, and exchanged for a replacement. However now the new second unit has just done the same thing after a couple of weeks!!! Very, very frustrating and annoying. Going to have to…

This isnt burn-in, it is horizontal banding. Ive seen OLED burn-in, as well as LED ‘fade’, and this isnt that.

Sometimes you can see the banding following a menu element, such as in the pattern, project, or song menus where there is a thick white bar that selects the option you want. As that white bar moves up and down, I can see several horizontal bars that travel along side that white bar, dimming and slightly flickering other menu elements. From what others have posted in that thread, it seems like this issue usually gets worse and leads to an RMA. : /

This is a bummer, but I love the device and will RMA it ASAP if it happens. Im also a little bugged that I cant really control my hardware synths using Syntakt via my DAW unless I buy MIDI cables. I thought (because of forum posts, the Syntakt manual, and some youtube videos) that I could use MIDI over USB + Overbridge + Syntakt “MIDI machines” to send MIDI info to hardware synths using Bitwig. This doesnt seem to work, and now that Ive done more reading it sounds like this will only work using MIDI DINs? I tried to ask a question about this elsewhere but nobody replied.

[shigginpit]

Bummer, but sweetwater is pretty good about return/exchange.

I don’t know anything about Bitwig but it looks like midi over usb works with ableton, this thread is talking about controlling synths in ableton with syntakt, however if you were outputting from your daw (ie the computer / daw was the host) to your hardware synths, I’d think it would work the same.

Can’t comment directly because I don’t do that but see if this helps at all?

Sequence synths in Ableton with Syntakt midi sequencer

I’m connected via USB, setting ”USB MIDI”. I can play synths in Ableton Live with the Syntakt keyboard and hear sounds and see the keys of the on screen keyboard of the synth in Ableton move, but I hear no sound nor see the keys of the on screen keyboard of the synth in Ableton move when running the Syntakt sequencer. Ableton receives midi, I can see the little yellow flash in the upper left corner. Doesn’t the Syntakt keyboard and the sequencer send on the same track? I have tried with all 1…

Someone details the setup for ableton and that might parallel to bitwig, the specifics you might have to figure out by process of elimination.

[Leonsarmiento]

@Milkman

I want to use the Transfer application

Sometimes Transfer crashes, like any other program. If you are using Windows the operating system cannot relaunch it again properly without restarting your PC first. I think @shigginpit advice is to restart your computer and start again too.

I have no idea if it’s the same on Mac.

[shigginpit]

Restart has been the only consistent fix in my case, but it hasn’t happened lately. It sounds like in the end that part of it worked out for him though.

[Milkman]

Thanks for the info about ableton + syntakt above! Im going to check this out and see if I can get it working. Bitwig is really great with midi routing, and Ive routed nasty things like NI’s maschine / mk3 in Bitwig, lol, so I should be able to get Syntakt going. I can try this in cubase 12 as well, but I doubt that will be easier to route. I assume I can use some of bitwig’s midi devices to make sure notes go from syntakt to hardware, but so far basic (easy) routing hasnt been successful.

[Milkman]

I didnt need to restart win10, I only needed to power off my syntakt, shut down transfer and overbridge, restart everything, and it was good. So far it hasnt happened again. Thank you for the reply! I was really hoping to hear from some people about this.