Just got my new Digitakt and thoroughly enjoying it so far. I already have the OT MkII and the DN, so it was very easy to pick up. I’ve been making beats way faster than when I was using the OT MkII, probably because there’s less to dial into the settings. Even when compared to the DN, the DT is more limited in that there aren’t multiple parameter pages under one button (DN has SYN1 1/2 and SYN 1/2 pages, whereas DT just has one FLTR, one AMP, one LFO page and so one), which I actually appreciate in that it keeps everything very contained and controlled in a way that speaks to me.
I posted in another thread about it, but my favorite feature of the DT so far has been the independence between trig note and sample tune, which allows me to “correct” the pitch of my sample so that a C note plays a C pitch, which you cannot do without resampling on the OT.
One thing I’ve been thinking about as I looked through the DT forum is that a significant number of people have found issue with the 2048 limit on the Sound Pool, as well as the difficulty in transferring sounds (C6 or Sysex Librarian messing up, MIDI settings, etc.) to and from their computers. In my usage of the DT, and perhaps due to my prior workflow from the OT, I don’t really rely on Sounds, and instead just start from raw samples that I select in the Samples menu and load onto my project RAM. One thing that I didn’t know before I bought the DT was that there is no limit to the number of Samples you can put on the DT. The limit is only on the Sound Pool (2048) and Project Sound Pool (128) and Sample Lists (127).
Even on the Digitakt manual, Elektron states “the primary benefit of Sounds loaded to the Sound pool is the possibility for them to be Sound locked.” Besides that, I don’t see much use in the Sound Pool, as I’m not much of a preset diver. I find preset-based workflow to be pretty limiting and time-consuming, and samples already seem like kind of a “preset” to me, so I’ve enjoyed starting from just samples and making my tracks from scratch every time. “From scratch” always seems to have this connotation of being a long-winded process, and it indeed is on certain devices, but with the DT, there’s only so much you can do with a sample anyway, so for me it really doesn’t take that much longer than if I had stored a bunch of Sounds and started my tracks with them.
tl;dr: The DT is just as limited as I had hoped, and the limitations it possesses are exactly the ones I needed to speed up my workflow. However, the one limitation it doesn’t have that surprised me is that there is no limit on the number of Samples it can hold on the +Drive. Mono samples are half the size of stereo samples too, so when I loaded a 600MB package onto my DT through Transfer, in only took up about 300MB!