David García Goñi released a brand new version of Elektroid, a sample and MIDI device manager for devices by Elektron, Arturia, Eventide, Moog, and Novation.
New features in this version:
- Audio recording
- Initial editing of samples
- Auto sampler
- Search on selected filesystems
- Possibility to only display a local file system (the ‘Show Remote’ toggle in the hamburger menu)
- CLI audio format converters
The project started out as a FOSS alternative to Electron Transfer, then effectively cannibalized two earlier projects by the same developer: MicroDude (Arturia MicroBrute librarian) and phatty (Moog Little Phatty librarian).
Here is the full list of supported devices:
- Elektron Model:Samples
- Elektron Model:Cycles
- Elektron Digitakt
- Elektron Digitone and Digitone Keys
- Elektron Syntakt
- Elektron Analog Rytm MKI and MKII
- Elektron Analog Four MKI, MKII and Keys
- All samplers implementing MIDI SDS
- Casio CZ-101
- Arturia MicroBrute
- Eventide ModFactor, PitchFactor, TimeFactor, Space and H9
- Moog Little Phatty and Slim Phatty
- Novation Summit and Peak
I’ve been eyeballing both MicroBrute and Peak lately (completely different beasts price- and feature-wise!), so it’s great to know that I wouldn’t need to switch to Windows to make at least some desktop use of either or them.
The program also does some fun extras. If you dig non-12TET big time, it can convert Scala files to MTS for use with Moog Phatty.
Elektroid is available as source code and a flatpak build, although the latter hasn’t been updated yet.
This is not the only useful project by David García for musicians. Overwitch provides a JACK client for Overbridge 2 devices like Analog Four MKII, Digitakt, Digitone, or Syntakt.
Overwitch 1.1 was released along with Elektroid 3.0 with the following changes:
- Support for Analog Heat +FX
- Improved support for PipeWire
- Latency reporting to JACK
Together, Elektroid and Overwitch cover a lot of ground for Elektron users. Probably not a drop-in replacement for their proprietary counterparts, but getting there at an impressive pace.
The developer also worked on a Linux kernel module for the E-Mu EIII and EIV sampler file systems and a CLI application to manage E-Mu EIII sampler bank files. I’d expect that to make its way to Elektroid at some point.
Featured photo by Alexey Demidov.
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