Because beyond the sound/kit/pattern relationships, you still have things like banks, chains, and songs. So if you don’t want to lose those, you need to save projects. Likewise, the sound pool is saved with a project. So if you took your time to load a set of samples into the pool for sound locking and you want to have them available in the future, you need to save. It always saves the current state of the active project in short term memory. But unless you explicitly save, all those project-level changes will be lost as soon as you switch to a different project.
That’s wrong. There are only 2 save functionalities which are essential and these are the only ones which will really write to the +drive:
- save project (saves everything except kits)
- save kit
The other “save” functionalities are not writing to the +drive, but just modify states in RAM and are only useful in combination with the corresponding reload functions.
The save pattern functionality generates a kind of restore point in RAM which you can use for reloading while a pattern is active.
When you switch to another pattern the previously one will be written automatically to this restore point in RAM. That’s called “auto-save”, but you need to be aware that nothing really got saved to the +drive this way. So when you switch to a different project without saving the project first you will loose all this “auto-saved” changed.
I haven’t touched my A4 for a while, but I guess “save sound” is the same kind of “restore point in RAM” functionality for a single sound. It will not alter anything on the +drive. To really save to the +drive you need to use “save kit”.
BTW: you can easily test this by your own. Alter a pattern and use save pattern, then reload the project (without saving it, of course). You will see your pattern changes are gone.
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Very useful summary.
You mean the save track function?
Btw, there’s another case in which saving is important.
If you’d want to get a full sysex back up of everything that’s in your project, you need to move all sounds that are used in a kit to the soundpool, (if you don’t do this, the sounds would be missing from the project) hit “save pattern” for all patterns and save all kits.
Then you can send “whole project”, “all kits”, “all patterns”, “all sounds” and “all globals” over sysex.
Just sending “whole project” doenst provide a full back up of everything in the project.
If you don’t interrupt the sysex dump, you get one sysex file, that contains, sounds, patterns, kits and everything else needed for the project.
The “store track sound” functionality (like it’s named in the latest manual) … [YES]+[SND], which will also do NOT write to the +drive, but operates only in RAM.
No, save pattern isn’t necessary. Just save the project. And going through all kits and save them at a later stage is useless, because you have already lost your changes when you had more than 2 unsaved kits.
Right from the expert’s mouth:
Save pattern not necessary for a sysex dump? Auto saved state is sufficient, sure?
I should have said make sure all kits are saved^^
Good to know that the A4/AK will keep two unsaved kits in memory!
Yes, I’m sure. The auto-save when switching to new pattern does exactly the same what a manual save pattern does. That’s the reason that you cannot reload to a previously manual saved pattern state after you switched to another pattern and back again (because the manual saved state got overwritten by the auto-save).
Good to know!
I wasn‘t 100% sure, but I guessed autosave would be enough.
That would actually save me tons of button presses^^
But I‘m really overly suspicious when it comes to saving stuff on gear and backups in general.
I‘m pretty much hitting save whenever possible on all my stuff and before I do a sysex dump on my AK I‘ll go through all patterns and kits and save them all again. Lol^^
Also always saving twice before switching of any Elektron 
It really sucks ass when you have to piece together a lost working state from the leftovers, though 
After reading you I was a bit afraid of saving everything!
Do you also save OT’s parts? I don’t, unless I want live Reload. 
Of course I save OT parts!
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Is this working with the last firmware?
Sorry for reopening an old topic, but that’s exactly what I want
Let’s say I have 2 patterns with 2 different kits. So, I can play with pattern 1 and mess the knobs, without saving anything, change to pattern 2, and then when coming back to pattern 1 it will have the original values? Is it?
Need to try 
Update: it worked like a charm 
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As a new owner who’s LOVING the new sounds I can make, does anyone know of a video that explains all this? I struggle to learn by reading, I prefer to watch it get shown to me. After the Digitakt this seems powerful… but complex.
But what a machine. Isn’t helping with my inability to avoid techno. I’ve given in.
Going to work out how to film and record so I can share my playtime.
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I‘m thinking about selling my AF MK2. If I copy all projects to my Laptop via transfer and ever decide to buy another AF, will all my projects be back after copying the projects from Laptop to AF? Or would there be issues with kits or anything?
I mean, you could just set it up that way in advance. I don’t tend to work that way cuz you get parameters jumping between patterns as you’ve probably changed parameters between all the kits.
but if you had loaded kits they will be linked to those patterns and they will all boot up as is, I don’t know why you’d need to:
Perhaps this has changed since 2016 though.
Wow it’s been a while! Pretty sure I ended up selling the A4 because of that