Decided I’d done enough manual/videos/forum digging to start on a proper song. Half an hour in, the following going on -
Track 1 - flex slot, single cycle wav, chromatic bass melody.
Track 2 - flex slot, single cycle wav, organ kind of melody.
Track 3 - static slot, cr78 kick drum, cr78 snare (sample locks in sequence to alternate)
Track 4 - static slot, cr78 hi-hat
All track have Lo-Fi + spring/dark reverb.
Everything going OK. Made a few patterns. Decided I didn’t like the bass sound on track 1. Pattern playing, start to audition different single cycle wavs, total freeze up… Switch off, switch on. Lost some stuff, hi-hat patterns, quickly reprogrammed what I could remember. Started auditioning samples for track 1 again. Instant total freeze again. Seriously?? I’m not a rich dude, OT is the most expensive thing I ever bought (on finance… Gotta pay for it in 12 months.) what the fuck is up with it freezing doing simple things, with barely anything going on that it’s advertised to do. Freaking out here thinking the machine is all hype and in practise is an unfinished piece of junk, albeit with a ton of potential, but if it doesn’t work then why is it on sale?!?
Should prob add that I’m using the kingston card that came with the OT. Been fine til now. And if elektron package it with the OT then I’m not about to start forking out money I don’t have to test other cards. Guess I’ll email elektron and also the place I bought the OT from. Seriously considering trying to cancel the credit purchase and return it. I really want it to work, I love the hands on worklflow and not being on a computer but I haven’t had a daw crash in months, and I use a ton of third party plug ins. Something self contained that costs as much as a decent laptop and has one job to do shouldn’t have shit like this happening… Especially in the first week!
Those Kingston cards that ship with the OT are crap. I decided to see about getting the samples off mine about a year after I got my OT, and the card was corrupted and would not work, despite just spending a year in a case inside a drawer.
Still, it shouldn’t be failing on you that quickly. For the sake of troubleshooting, try creating a new project and adding some samples to the Flex and Static slots to try to recreate the freeze, then report back to us.
Figured the Kingston cards wouldn’t be the best but also thought that surely a company wouldn’t ship a card that is so slow that it crashes their own machine just to save a few quid…
I’ll troubleshoot like you advised. But problems like this so early on leave a horrible taste in my mouth and I’d be beyond nervous using it a show now. Confidence is gone instantly… Which really sucks
Setup a new project. Same problem… Been a long day and my 1yr old daughter is sick so I’m gonna have to leave it til tomoro to look any further at it. Pretty gutted about it though…
Give the Octatrack a chance, this is an annoying bug but for now, you can work around it by doing things a bit more slowly and stopping playback while auditioning samples. Also there is a setting that makes auditioned samples be heard with all the track settings applied, you can try using that and audition each sample rather than load it to the playing track each time.
I use VST’s on a computer too and even an advanced sampler like Kontakt sometimes produces a crackle when changing samples while its being sequenced.
Lets hope this gets fixed soon
Give the Octatrack a chance, this is an annoying bug but for now, you can work around it by doing things a bit more slowly and stopping playback while auditioning samples. Also there is a setting that makes auditioned samples be heard with all the track settings applied, you can try using that and audition each sample rather than load it to the playing track each time.
I use VST’s on a computer too and even an advanced sampler like Kontakt sometimes produces a crackle when changing samples while its being sequenced.
Lets hope this gets fixed soon ;)[/quote]
If it’s temporary until a fix with an update then I can live with doing things slowly. But elektron need to give some indication of when this will be…
it takes forever to find the best sound if you can’t audition samples in context while the song is playing. Not sure I’m down for having to do that on a brand new £1000 machine. I’ll see how things go over next few days…
I get your comparison to kontakt loading etc but for the kind of crackle you mention I’d have to be loading a big 1gb sample library or something (though that usually isn’t a problem) , the OT is struggling with a tiny single cycle waveform… So no comparison really…
Thanks for trying to cheer me up but I worry your optimism is possibly misplaced considering how long it’s been since the previous update and how many users have been complaining about this problem… Guess we’ll see, hope you’re right!
There are a lot of people reporting the same problems. Apparently elektron have acknowledged it’s a bug related to current firmware. A fix is supposedly in the pipeline. Not sure I have the patience for such a buggy machine tho. The idea behind my getting an OT was convenience. Crashing/losing work in my first proper session with the machine has left me feeling like it’s not reliable enough for live use and wondering if I’d be better off getting a small Macbook/ableton/controller for sofa/bed jamming. I have NEVER crashed ableton on my daw laptop… Sucks though cos I actually really like the OT so far, when it works…
You do get the impression that accessing the CF card while doing other stuff is the Octatrack’s Achilles heel (with the vague ‘static v. flex’ advice in the manual.).
When I first got this freeze I thought I would just avoid loading new samples from CF while running, but it is so much more intuitive if you have a load of one-shots in a folder on the card, to just press FUNCTION and RIGHT to keep loading up the next one and hearing it in context.
So now each time I think “risk it or no?”
I can’t remember if this only started happening with 1.25E but if it IS just a bug on the latest update then really, I have no complaint. It will be great to have it fixed.
From what I have read, a lot of great features have been added to the OT over time, which new users like me now benefit from. And if Elektron are also fixing bugs then I consider the support to be pretty good. However, when something like this comes up, a statement from Elektron would be appreciated.
I understand the expense/disappointment thing but I think you’ve been unlucky to run into something like this early on. By the time I got my first freeze the OT had had time to prove itself worth the expense, so I was ready to forgive!
Yeah, just a solid statement from elektron addressing the issue and giving a time frame for a fix would make me feel 100% better. Hoping I’ll receive something like this when they reply to the email I sent last night. Until then I’m going to find it difficult to feel like I haven’t over spent on a unit that isn’t able to do the things it is advertised to. Realtime auditioning/selection of alternate samples is a very important feature to me and one that I made sure the OT provided before I purchased… I agree that early support/development on the OT seems like it was great (still haven’t forgotten the way that korg totally ignored the microsampler after release which really could have benefited from a couple of tiny work flow tweaks…) and that adding new features sometimes can also introduce complications. It’s just sods law that I buy the machine in a spell where elektron seem to have left it behind a little bit, regardless of big problems. But as I said, could just be me feeling hard done by/ripped off as it’s so new to me and hitting crashes almost instantly. If elektron can provide reassurance and get a fix out then fair enough.
Been doing some further research. See link below. Seems like people having this problem even before the most recent update. So I don’t know what to think now guessing it would have been fixed already if it could be? But then again, users are saying that elektron recently acknowledged the issue and have promised a fix…
Can’t advertise a piece of hardware as being able to realtime preview samples if in fact it’s buggy as hell and causes total system freeze up… Really hope I’m proved wrong but this all reeks of general instability with simple functions hopefully I’ll hear back from elektron soon…
Static samples are the problem here, you can do what you are trying to do with flex samples only right? So try just using flex slots and see if it works.
It was actually crashing when previewing flex track sample slots, not static. I mean for example I have a sample in flex slot 1, I select it, then access audio pool, then preview new samples. Crash.
I’ll set up a test project and see if static also does the same thing. But either way it doesn’t really help?
FWIW, I’m still on 1.25B (I think…it was the last update for a long time, until the last couple of minor bug squashes…factory installed from late May/June 2014) and do not have this issue. Maybe somebody can get you that version to install for troubleshooting?
Just uploaded OSv1.25B to the Files section. Direct Link
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Good looking out, Rusty! Although you might want to check that link, as it just sent me down the spiral.
For the lazy: http://www.elektronauts.com/files/download/171
Just uploaded OSv1.25B to the Files section. Direct Link
[/quote]
Good looking out, Rusty! Although you might want to check that link, as it just sent me down the spiral.
For the lazy: http://www.elektronauts.com/files/download/171[/quote]
Thats so you can see just how deep the rabbit hole goes
Thanks guys for the upload/link. When I get some time I’ll try the older os.
I’m getting really confused now tho, are a lot of users running this version of os to avoid the problem?
One minute I’m reading that elektron have fully acknowledged the issue and are working on a fix, the next I’m being told that this isn’t normal behaviour for octatrack. Elektron have replied (though no info received yet, just advised to grab a support ticket), hopefully get it sorted or replaced/returned.
