Patterns disappearing on new digitone firmware

Elektron Gear Digitone/Digitone Keys
#1

So I was worried I was going crazy as I wrote and thankfully recorded a whole song idea/pattern last night. Unfortunately now it seems to be completely missing from my digitone now, no idea what could have happened other than me turning it on and off, but the whole song and pattern I did yesterday is gone. which kind of sucks as I have no idea how to reproduce the song now, sigh.

Anyone else experiencing this? First time this has ever happened to me with the machine and I’ve been using it for like, 2-3 years. Usually you can just turn it off and it picks right back up at where you were before you turned it off, did the new firmware change that or something?

#2

Don’t think it’d be anything to do with the new firmware, but it happened to me once, many years ago.

If it only did it the once, I’d say it was one of those very rare cases where it just doesn’t remember itself. If it’s done it a few times, I think you’d best open up a support ticket with Elektron.

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#3

This just happened to me. Thankfully it was just a basic sketch of a beat and not an entire song.
I opened a new bank and started a beat on pattern 1, turned the machine off, then came back today and the pattern is gone. Time to start FUNC -> Save Pattern-ing before powering down.

#4

For this to happen after 2-3 years…is a testament to how good the Digitone is. I have had the DN also for 2-3 years and have had fewer than a handful mess-ups. And no problems with my current firmware 1.40!

If you can still find the project in the project list, I suggest selecting it as active project, doing a sysex backup of that project, then reinstall the same project, from your computer, back into an new, initialized program slot. I did this once, and everything started working correctly. Made me think that the project data itself wasn’t corrupted, but rather that the DN was mis-reading the data. Good luck!

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#5

As I understand the root cause of the pattern corruption is the complexity of how the memory physically works. The memory chip is a volatile RAM combined with a non-volatile flash. It features the best of both technologies but need some care to operate.
It looks like a large and fast RAM from outside. To preserve the content after power off the transfer from RAM to flash memory is done automatically. However if Digitone is not powered off properly the transfer will not be complete. In this case after next power on the firmware detects corruption and recover to the latest saved state in the flash memory.
How can this happen? The adapter cable or the DC connector or the rocker switch can have a contact spike or prelling which confuses the power off automatic transfer.
The second way is software freeze - the “high pitch noise”. There is some bug in the firmware that let the RAM in a corrupted or incomplete state. The corruption is detected at next power on and last known to be good state is loaded from the flash.
I always manually save patterns, songs and projects after changes made.

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