I’m acquiescing. The forum pundits are right. I am finding Motif file management to be difficult to grasp. Hard to say if it’s worth the cost for me. I would do it again. I think. I’m in too deep to give up now. And I won’t. For me, it is hard to have the mindset to tackle Motif file management and the initial creative intention for getting a Motif during the same season.

What’s hard -for me - is reconciling the mindset of easily moving and appending files on a desktop OS environment with what’s necessary with the XF, including with the assistance of Melas Motif Tools.

I’m closer to the peak that I’ve ever been with it; but not there. And, I’m a real slow learner.

The most difficult time seems to be when initially setting up the flash modules. Unfortunately, I can’t make the task easier to accomplish - it is what it is - but I’ll try to answer any questions that come up.

You may find that as you progress with Waveform installation the task will become less annoying, not only because you’ll become more familiar with procedures, but because you’ll likely be making fewer and fewer additions/changes.

I hear you.  I jumped right in with having a flash board installed.  After the fact I started to realize It really increased the learning curve.  I got John Melas tools which did simplify things alot but there were still complicated procedures to follow to do the things I wanted.  Don’t give up.  It’s just not gonna happen overnight.

Developing a pattern has helped me.  I made sure to load something everyday.  Making sure to select FL1=NONE - I think the standard setting for loading should be all flash set to none.  But that’s not the case so get that set in your mind when loading.  Just break things down, 1 step at a time.  It’s like creating a picture in your head of a large building complex.  You have to explore each little part then you can start to put all the pieces together.  Search in the forums also.  Chances are that your questions have already been asked.  I’ve heard some of the DVD’s are good too.

I know enough to collect my own favorites from multiple collects, and put them on the flash drive.  It’s even fun to load some old sound banks that address sounds that used to be on the flash board....lol It’s a great creative tool once you understand what’s going on.  So, help me get a refresher course and ask away!

File management has always been a problem.

Until the XS, Motif sequencer data was lost when cycling power. You had to remember to save it before you touched the power switch. With the Motif Classic and ES, if you used PLG boards the user voice data for those was lost on power off. Until the XF all waveforms were lost on power down.

The way you dealt with those issues was using Autoload files, something I am very happy to not deal with any more. Waiting for my ES to start up if my Autoload file had any waveforms in it would take a little over 5 minutes for every 64MB of waveforms. As a result I never used all 512MB of RAM at one time, it would take about an hour to load. On the ES, the file must be named Autoload, so if you need to keep multiple unique copies, each one needs it’s own folder otherwise they would be overwritten. I kept a USB drive attached to my ES at all times so saving and loading files was as painless as possible.

With flash storage of sequence data and the flash boards for waveforms I no longer use Autoload files...I upgraded to the XF just for that. As far as backups, I’m connected to my computer over Ethernet which finally means no more swapping a thumb drive between devices.

Other horror stories:

Although the Korg Kronos has an SSD inside, you still have to remember to save your sequences to disk. I’m not sure if there is a way to reload them automatically. You would think Korg would provide flash memory for this the way the XS, XF, MOX and MOXF do. Although some samples can be streamed from the SSD, some need to be loaded into RAM every time you power up. The minimum startup time for a Kronos is 2 minutes, somewhat longer if you are using all the sample RAM. I’m not sure how difficult it is to backup the SSD itself.

I don’t think I want to talk about synths I owned in the late 1980s that were backed up using cassette tapes. I finally got one that had a floppy drive but the floppy format was proprietary so to make backups you had to do them on the synth, a computer couldn’t read it. With only 64KB of memory, backing up a 720K floppy mean about a dozen disk swaps had to be done.

Good stuff, guys. Puts it in perspective, & thank you for the support.

I’ve got to remember this.

mikebengel - 16 November 2016 07:42 PM

… Developing a pattern has helped me.  I made sure to load something everyday.

When I got my XF7 I also bought a brand new spiral notebook!  I started documenting the how and why of everything I was doing from file management, to favorite factory preset voices/performances, to custom sample waves I made and how I got them on flash, drumsets I created with custom samples, things I learned with songs/patterns etc.  Basically anything I did beyond just the joy of playing this amazing instrument. 

I found having all these notes written down made it much easier to visualize what was going on inside my XF AND even more importantly, saved me tons of time when I had to repeat a task that I performed many months back after realizing I forgot how I did it :-)