Octatrack / A4 - Bank organizer / library / Editor for computer

Elektron Gear Octatrack
#1

Is anyone working on one of these?
I used to have the Electribe and there was a bunch of editors to easy overview your banks and sounds to copy paste parts forth and back.

Here is one editor with a nice overview for the ESX: http://www.skratchdot.com/projects/esx-wave-organizer/

I work with the concept 1 bank / track.
My wish is to save all banks to the computer like separate tracks and then be able to load them in different orders while building live sets.

It can be done in the memorycard-editor by backing up de destination bank by copying it somewhere else and then renaming the origin bank to the same name of the wanted destination and replacing the destination bank with the origin.
But you don’t get a good overview and it is easy to mess up.

With some basic programming skills it must be super easy to write a simple program to make the same back-up/replace procedure in a simple table-editor.

Kindly Regards
/H

#2

I was thinking I could try making one for the OT, to move patterns and parts around in different banks, and to manage the sample slots, with the eventual goal of being able to combine banks from different projects into a live set, retaining all the sample references. However, since I don’t see any documentation for the file formats on the OT I’m afraid it’s a non-starter (reverse engineering is no fun). I’d like to do the same thing for the A4 as well, but again… a description of the sysex format would be needed.

Without a description of the file / sysex formats, I think it would be really hard for anyone but Elektron to do it. That doesn’t mean someone won’t try though.

#3

I really want something like this. It’s such a bummer not to be able to copy patterns from one project to another!

#4

I could be wrong, but you might be able to copy a pattern, load another project, and paste it if the copy-paste buffer is not cleared out when loading a project. Sample locks would probably be all messed up though, because the slots on the destination project would be different.

Yeah… that’s not really that useful, even if it does work.

#5

Just mail them and ask for the info you need.
I’m sure they will handle you the info. Eould the great if you could program one!

#6

Emailed them. :slight_smile:

#7

I’ve already built a sample manager / editor / bank mover etc, but it is not publicly released yet… I’m fairly under the pump with a couple of other projects at the moment.

See here for more info.

This is what I was attempting to do, but there is no documentation for the encrypted file formats, Elektron won’t supply the information, and I can’t be bothered trying to reverse engineer / decrypt them, definitely no fun there.

#8

I’ve just sent Jon a pm about coughing up the code.

#9

I’ve just sent Jon a pm about coughing up the code.

#10

Just wanted to say thanks to Rusty and the rest of you guys for looking at this.

My octatrack cards are just scattered with projects/parts/samples (pretty much a jumble sale). The opposite of organised and to be honest pretty useless if I wanted to squeeze bits together from one setup to another.

I’d love to see a bit of a re-thinking of the file system from Elektron, i’d probably blank my cards for it and start again if they could get it right but I dont think we will see it.

#11

Jon responded to my email just now. :slight_smile: So…
…

The good news is, Elektron doesn’t have any problem with publishing the file format.

Unfortunately, with all the (great) work that is going on, they don’t have anything to publish. Understandable, at least from my perspective.

Thinking out loud here…

While I wait for the OT format, maybe I can switch gears and look at the code that someone (void ?) posted on github for the sysex format of some of the other machines. Maybe my first contribution will be not code, but some github ‘markdown’ documentation of the sysex format? While that’s not the most fun task for me, it would sure make writing an application much more fun once it was done.

Who knows, maybe the A4 sysex format has some commonality with the OT file format!

#12

Btw, I did make it clear that most likely anything I would produce would be Open Sourced. They seemed to have no problem with that, so that’s good.

#13

Can’t wait to see this program get going. So nice.
Big up.

#14

:joy:

Well, if they do that will change plans a bit…

#15

I’m surprised they don’t have a .h file sitting about naming all the fields etc., but then again they probably don’t want to expose any of the sequencer functions which might also be in there.

I guess I should upload a bunch of projects and bring them into a hex editor…

#16

^this. glad there are people around here with both technical knowhow and the willingness to help the community with it.

#17

When I asked, I was told no. But if they are prepared to release information to me, then I will see what I can do about accessing the bank / pattern / sample assignments; till then, a nit of a holding pattern.

#18

I’d like to collaborate on it, if possible. I do have a considerable amount of software engineering experience. :slight_smile: Though I’d understand if you want to go it alone, if for example you are planning on making this a commercial product. If you’re willing to make it OSS, I would definitely be able to make some contributions of some sort.

#19

Yeah, that’d be a bit tricky unless they were extremely disciplined in making their header files. You’re exactly right in that ‘other stuff’ would tend to creep in. Actually, in my mind that’s reverse engineering too, just at a higher level.

I’d much rather have a human readable document that describes the format in a tabular form like the MIDI implementation guides in the manuals.

I know how hard it is to fully describe every bit in a binary file format. I’ve done it before. So, I get why the Elektron engineers haven’t done that yet.

#20

I’d like to collaborate on it, if possible. I do have a considerable amount of software engineering experience. :slight_smile: Though I’d understand if you want to go it alone, if for example you are planning on making this a commercial product. If you’re willing to make it OSS, I would definitely be able to make some contributions of some sort.[/quote]
I did get your pm, just weighing up what to say, so apologies if it comes across as rude, but I’ll be in touch shortly.