Streaming Long and Heavy Samples (300mb) on OT

Hi,

I’m preparing a performance where I have to rely on a few atmospheric backing tracks, and I wonder if anyone has experience with using heavy and long samples with the OT?

I have a 25min long, 300MB track that I want to load so it plays continuously throughout the performance, and I wonder if this is prone to problems?

I’ve been reading the “Some Thoughts on the Octatrack” PDF, and in there it’s mentioned that streaming high quality long samples “puts a heavy burden on the cf-card and by doing so,
you can run into timing problems when the card is cheap and not fast enough.
Therefore, although streaming can be used, my personal attitude is that I avoid
it as much as possible, just to be on the safe side.”

Anyone has experience with this?

Thanks!

Just try to playseveral 300mb samples at the same time to check if it’s reliable…
Never tried that long.

yea trying this now for sure, bouncing the track to the OT.

just anxious about ending up in a situation where i’m misusing the OT in a way that would cause it to be flaky, and that on performance day it wouldn’t stream right because it’s not meant for it.

You’d use Ot only ?
I wouldn’t slave it or send it too much midi messages…

Hello-
It’s heavily dependent upon the quality/speed of the CF card. It’s supported as far as I know, but maximize your success by looking for fast recommended cards in this forum.

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Oh I see, thanks. I’m using the CF card that came with the Octatrack, it’s the Kingston 16GB Ultimate 266X.

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Like CF for shooting HD videos on DSLR…

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I wish I had time to get a better one, but it’s for tomorrow. I looked up the specs for this specific card and it says:

“read and write speeds of 45MB/s and 40MB/s, respectively. These speeds allow for smooth continuous shooting, HD video capture and card-to-computer transfers”

So hopefully it won’t end up being flaky!

That card should do just fine.
I’ve streamed 2gb files with no problems from a similar but larger card.
Even 24bit files will work.

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Ooh great thank you! Encouraging to know you’ve tried this successfully.

Of course, loading it into OT and actually playing it out to yourself might be worth the extra 25min, if you want to be 100% sure.
I’ve encountered corrupted files on rare occasions, that suddenly turn into horrible digital noise for some reason. But that was not a kingston card.

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yes definitely, i fear of these surprises, gonna listen at least a couple of times to make sure that there are no oddities!

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hey when I do this kind of thing I play them off a phone thru external inputs of the machine (in my case mpc1000 or OT). If it’s a sample that’s basically only going to have the level changed (no other manipulation) that saves a lot of hassle & frees up needing to worry about triggering/managing the track as samples.

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Thanks yea that’s an option too. I wanted to have the possibility to use some of the OT eq and filter on the tracks.

But am I missing something or is it true that in order to stream a 25min long sample I have to keep creating trigerless patterns and arrange them consecutively in the arranger so that the 25mins play in full?

Arranger is not required for that.
When the sequencer is playing, i set a trig in grid recording mode, wait until the sequencer plays the trig, then remove the trig. (quantized start)
Or you can trigger the sample with the appropriate sequencer trig button in live recording mode. (human timing start)

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Thanks! Yes, your way seems a lot more logical, mine was a strange roundabout way.

Are there any performance implications/side-effects that you are aware of and I might not be, for setting that track to 64/64 X1/8 ?

There’s always a lot of speculation about the wisdom of buying the fastest possible Cards … I tend to take my cues from the Manufacturer, they won’t want a stock card letting them down in the field, besides there’s nothing in it financially, these cards are very cheap in the grand scheme of things … Elektron don’t need the drama of marginally specced cards making their hardware look flaky

Anyway - even if you were streaming 8 stereo tracks at 24bit, by my reckoning there’s a good factor of comfort left over - note, i don’t know exactly how the data is pulled/cached/whatever (especially when handling multiple streams) - but in simple data rate terms relative to the quoted spec of 45MB/s there’s over 20x margin of comfort in a worst case scenario - so i am not sure what you achieve by throwing money at a Faster card unless the current card is somehow throttling the data … it may be faster writing to a better spec card, who knows, but all the anecdotal evidence on these pages is that there’s no real difference besides tiny load time improvements when loading in projects

as mentioned, the best thing to do is to try the worst case scenario - satisfy yourself that the card and machine are capable to do their advertised jobs and pay less attention to what you read online (including this i should add)

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You rely more on your phone than on OT ? :aw:
Mpc 1000 can’t play more than 128mb so this make sense in that case.

You could still use the FX if the audio if coming from an external source - just use a thru track.

It should work internally, just be aware that if you mess with the ‘rate’ parameter your track will go out of sync.

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hee, it was a way of covering the load time of a new song on the mpc with some sting or tiny track off a playlist. On the OT it’s just like using the mixing/treating an external source with less hassle than streaming off the CF card.