The Digitone and Digitakt need some gosh darn software management programs - A rant

Need to rant a minute. I love my Digi-boxes. They’re great pieces of gear and I have a blast using them. However, trying to merge, rearrange, and overall manage projects is a goddang nightmare. Seriously. Elk-Herd is great for the Digitakt, but obviously it’s @mzero passion project, but we shouldn’t need to rely on someone to dissect the machine’s codes/file structure just to be able to do project management. Oh, and don’t get me started on the inability to backup all the machines at once easily! AAAAAARGH!

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It boggles the mind why this isnt standard functionality in the Elektron Transfer program. I mean, if we can copy samples in and out why not project files? Even the Octatrack can do this and its 10 years old.

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They export projects as Sysex files.
Drag and drop. Easy.

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more details on this? I didn’t know it was possible

Its in the manual.
Ess released an album including the Sysex files so, Ive got his project in my digitakt.

Surprised people are missing this.

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Surprised I missed this as well! Gonna look into that.

I know you can backup individual projects. I want to be able to back up every project and sound at once, which is not doable at the moment. Then I want to be able to view those project structures on my computer so I can merge patterns from various ones into one big project.

Are you telling me that you can use sysex to easily and quickly take, for example, patterns A02, A06, and A07, from one project and put them in another one without having to do a million little steps? Have you ever used @Rusty Octaedit or Elkherd? That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.

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Pretty sure you can back up the entire machine.

As for project editing ( which is what you seem to be wanting to do) I dont know.
Ive heard of octa edit, never used it. Never heard of elkheard. I dont use the computer much at all, I dont have any real need to.

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It´s something that Elektron lacks, a good management software for all their boxes…

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If you can, then I couldn’t figure it out. I spent a couple of hours backing up around 77 projects individually, it was a painful procedure.

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But, AFAIK, when you backup a project samples are not included. So if you delete the samples used in a project, when you restore it, it doesn’t sound.
Is that correct?

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I did it around a year ago and haven’t tried importing the projects since. They were exported as sysex files, so I’m assuming no samples.

Not as one backup though , the samples and projects may know where to go once on the machine but require their own separate backup process meaning you have to remember which sample files belong to which projects. Digitakt backup is an after thought imo and is more something you do when you need to rather than as choice, overbridge users and those perma connected to a computer may disagree.

According to How to backup all my work? - #7 by JPM there is a backup feature in development which includes samples for the Transfer app (Digitakt). That would be very velcome!

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I think the problem is not backup, I want to move things from one project to other without having to copy, load the project, paste, go back to other project, etc.

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Even then, you can’t easily copy and paste from one project to another.

@Microtribe Project editing is exactly what I want to do :slight_smile: If you have a Digitakt, def. check out Elk-Herd. It’s great for easy organization.

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Moonbeams. Bunny Rabbits.

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First, Transfer is getting better and better.
We still see improvements coming, let’s not desperate ^^
I too would love to see some total backup at once.

Now rearranging patterns is another matter.
Maybe you could try conceiving the tool that would do this, a mock-up with screens of actual Transfer tool, to suggest Elektron what kind of functionalities it should cover.

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I mean, Elk-Herd and Octaedit are perfect examples. Hell, hire those guys and let them build it!

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i really wish there was an option to export the samples with your project on the digitakt. that’s my biggest complaint right now.