Following the apparent abandonment of OctaEdit, there is now a very clear need for a software editor for the Octatrack. As there seems to be nothing remotely similar out there, I’ve decided to look into doing something myself.
To be clear, I have no plans to replicate OctaEdit. Although it was a little before my time as an Octatrack user, what I’ve seen and heard about it looks great. Hats off to Rusty for all his hard work!
I’m mostly just interested in basic librarian functionality: viewing the contents of a project, swapping banks, and maybe eventually, some more advanced stuff like swapping parts, patterns and samples, and creating new projects from existing banks.
I’ve started capturing some thoughts and some initial findings as I dig into the file formats here:
There’s also a simple C# console app that will spit out the part names for a project. My hope for phase 1 is to get this to a point where it can provide a decent visual representation of a project, along with a command to swap banks. If I learn enough about the proprietary file formats along the way, I can then try to tackle some more advanced functionality.
This is very preliminary and I can’t promise it will go anywhere, but I am committed to sharing my findings (and code) with the community and will happily accept any help anybody is willing to offer.
A whole lot of respect and appreciation for your initiative! All it takes is the first step, but with something as emotionally loaded as the OT, anything that gets close to it risks burning.
If you have a tip jar, let us know! Or even a Patreon for monthly submissions. I’m sure we’d all chip in.
I appreciate it! I don’t expect anything but I also won’t say no. I’ve enabled sponsorship on my GitHub:
If that doesn’t work for the majority I can look into other options. I used to have a Patreon but I found it was creating the wrong type of incentive for me: pressure to create exclusive content for patrons (vs content to share with the world), and it brought out a (negative) urge to want to tease exclusive content as a means to get more patrons. Maybe I’ll try it again some day with a different model/mindset.
In the meantime, some good progress today! I’ve got my little prototype app reading out all part names, and iterating all patterns to figure out which have content (i.e. not empty). Admittedly my pattern content check is completely arbitrary and grasping at straws, but it seems to work. (I have feeling that’s going to be the name of the game here…)
Congrats for starting the task, so far any attempt seemed quite doomed (probably because the 2 different ones I saw were trying to do too many tasks where everyone is mostly craving about “simply” being able to move banks around). Shame on Elektron for never supporting these kind of actions and kudos to you @snugsound for giving it a try!
PS: i would help with pleasure but i don’t know nothing about coding…
I’ve added a command to swap banks within a project. It’s not much to look at, but it gets the job done! And yeah, this is totally something you can do directly on the filesystem, but I feel the crude project representation really helps you get your bearings, especially if you use part names.
Promising work so far! Just an idea but I’m sure people would be willing to support you monetarily for something like OctaEdit as you get further along, Patreon or one time donations stuff like that if development is consistent. Getting money involved is not everyone’s cup of tea but just an idea. But i know this would be a dream for many OT users. Maybe I’ll finally get one of these evil boxes if a decent PC transfer/librarian tool comes along…
I will say, in defense of the Octatrack, sample management is sooo much better than the boxes that use Transfer (Digitakt/Rytm/M:S). Literally just copy/paste, and it’s lightning fast.
…