Octatrack usb mode not showing up on pc/MacBook

Elektron Gear Octatrack
#1

Hi there,

I’ve looked around searching for similar problems, but I couldn’t find my exact situation.

I have an Octatrack MKI, it worked fine and I have used usb disk mode to load samples often. However, recently it stopped working.

The disk won’t show up on my MacBook using the usb cable, nor on a different laptop. The Octatrack does show a USB cable disconnected notification on screen if I remove the cable. Plus a different Octatrack MKII does work using the same computers/cables, so it can’t be the hardware.

I tried formatting the CF card in the octatrack itself. The octatrack itself worked fine with samples before I formatted it.

Does anyone know how to fix this?

1 Like
#2

Welcome @vuurtoren.
I have no explanation, but I’d also try the card in a card reader, or in MKII.

Sometimes I use my smartphone to upload/download files, with USB C adapter. Worked with Samsung A51, iPhone 7, iPad (OT MKI and MKII).

#3

Once I had a dumb setting in my Finder on a Mac that was hiding USB disks. I think I did the following:

  1. With the USB cable disconnected, open a terminal on your Mac and type mount and hit return. Observe the output – these are all your mounted disks, including the local hard drive.

  2. Connect the USB cable, enable USB disk mode on the OT.

  3. In the Mac terminal, type mount and hit return. Observe this output. Is it different?

In my case, on step 3 I saw the OT disk mounted, so I just interacted with it through the command line and then later found the stupid Finder setting – Finder sucks, it should really be called Loser :wink:

If the disk isn’t mounting, it’s probably a problem on the OT, CF card, or USB cable – I think this is more likely in your situation since the problem is also present on Windows (sorry, don’t have many Windows tips for this stuff, I’m really a Linux guy).

I would also boot up the Octatrack in Test mode: hold FUNC down while powering up. It might catch an issue on the OT.

Hope this helps. Good luck!

2 Likes
#5

Hey there, I had a similar issue and the following worked for me: Octatrack not working in USB mode - #15 by datarishi

There may be other useful suggestions for you in that thread. Cheers!

#6

I was just copying some samples to and from the OT and thought of this thread. @vuurtoren, did you ever sort this out?

#7

I tried a card reader, the CF-card works in here, so I guess the issue lies with the OT.

#8

The CF card works with a card reader, so I think the OT’s usb mode is faulty. This will be the way I’ll export and import now. Thanks for the tip!

1 Like
#9

Yes. I bought a card reader to just read the CF-card and this works fine. Using it via this route I can now read/write the CF-card.