Remote sample management via Raspberry Pi

Elektron Gear Octatrack
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I used to have a little problem. All of my “live” gear is set up in one corner of the studio, while the DAW is on the opposite side. Being my OT part of the live setup, I always had to move it over to the computer desk – and unplug / replug all attached cables – to manage the samples on it.
But no more!
I can now manage all the files on the OT via network, by using a tiny screen-less Raspberry Pi computer.
If you also have this problem, and have access to a Raspberry Pi (or any comparable mini-computer running linux), this is how it works:

First of all make sure you have SSH enabled.

Power everything up, attach the USB cable from the OT to the Rpi and set it to USB disk mode

Connect to the RPi via SSH, then input the following:

sudo mkdir /media/usb
sudo chown -R pi:pi /media/usb
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /media/usb -o uid=pi,gid=pi

The content of the OT’s CF card will be bow accessible under /media/usb/
Of course you can substitute “/media/usb” for anything to your liking, eg. /media/ot-cf

Now you can use any SFTP client (I use FIlezilla) to copy/move/delete files from and to your OT!

To unmount just do

sudo umount /media/usb

then exit USB disk mode

9 Likes
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Is it powered by the usb port from the OT? I am a Pi noob, interested though as my new music room will have also hardware/software separated sides.

Edit: ok it’s not, no big deal, maybe just pimp it with pisound then as I am at it.

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Yes, that’s what I have got (the Pisound board) and how I came up with the idea in the first place. :slight_smile:

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Good idea @papernoise

Just a hint. You may like to add sync, especially if you copy a lot of samples. It shouldn’t be needed nowadays, but it want hurt.

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So cool! Great share. :+1:

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Afaik umount will complete any pending operations before actually unmounting the disk, but it might not give you an obvious feedback about it.
As a general advice I’d say, leave the thing idle for a bit after you copy lots of – or big – files and then unmount the disk, no matter if you execute sync or not before unmounting.

Looks like there’s also ejectwhich is optimized to really eject CD/DVD drives and USB media
See here: https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/14843/how-to-eject-usb-device-on-raspberry-pi-not-just-unmount#14850
and
https://packages.debian.org/jessie/eject

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You’re totally right, umount will do it and in this situation sync isn’t needed. I guess it’s just a peculiarity of mine to sync if i do stuff like dd or larger cp transactions. From now and then i’m in such hurry that i pull out a usb stick without unmounting it first. :nyan:

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Hehe, yeah, that happens! :slight_smile:
And yes, you right about being safe rather than sorry!