SD card for Organelle

[dbetz]

I’d like to make a backup of the SD card in my new Organelle. I notice that the card that came with it is a class 4 card. Is there any benefit to be gained by using a faster card? It looks like class 10 8gb cards are available for around $10. Will that perform any better than the class 4 card that came with the Organelle?

[Lazaruz4]

Wondering about this myself! what spec and best size, all that good stuff.

[thetechnobear]

I use class 10 16gb San Disk Ultra … and they are great
(but 8gb is probably going to be C&Gs image… and thats more than enough)

yes, they will perform better, but reality is, you’ll probably only notice if patches start doing streaming.
as otherwise the size of the files is pretty small, as they have to be loaded into memory.

but considering the price differential, its not really worth considering cheap SD cards.

[dbetz]

Is there any easy way to expand the 8gb C&G image to use the full size of a larger SD card? It seems to happen automatically with the newer RaspberryPi operating systems.

[AndyCap]

@thetechnobear

ok, so I have this working

you will need a new version of mother to be able to use the sdcard for patches, which I now have, and will release a beta ‘shortly’… also the instructions below are for those happy with linux, Id hope later we will be able to script these for everyone, to just fire off from the organelle lcd (like the upgrading of OS)

steps required:

a) get a bigger SD card, make sure its fast - Ive used a 32GB I had lying around

(actually smaller are usually faster, so ideally use the smallest that has enough space for you - remember organelle os is currently using 4gb, so an 8gb card will mean you have 4gb for patches/samples etc)

b) install the Organelle image on this card, I use DD, but there are lots of tools that can do this, as @oweno mentioned

c) take the 4gb card out from your organelle and insert your new one

(this is cool, means you have a backup if this goes wrong )

d) power up organelle, all should be as before.

e) you now need to log into organelle using ssh , then do the following

run disk to create a new primary partition, you can accept the defaults

fdisk /dev/mmcblk0

n
p
w
then you need to reboot

reboot
you now need to create a filesystem on the new partition

mkfs.ext4 /dev/mmcblk0p2
now we need to check it works, so we need to create a mount point, which means we need to write to the main disk

by mounting it… then we mount it to check it works

~/scripts/remount-rw.sh
mkdir /sdcard

mount /dev/mmcblk0p2 /sdcard
ok, you can go to the /sdcard and check you can write files there ok

now we want it to mount automatically on startup, so alter fstab

vi /etc/fstab
/dev/mmcblk0p2 /sdcard ext4 defaults,noatime 0 0
thats it reboot organelle, copy over your patches from your usb card,

then assuming your using my new mother, you can shutdown your organelle, remove the usbcard, and now organelle will use your sdcard

dev note:.

we could script the above, so could be done without logging into organelle

@oweno - I think arch linux is using < ~2gb , so perhaps, we could even repartition the supplied sdcard, to give 2gb for patches? … this would be cool, so you know everyone is using sdcard… not sure how practical this is!?

Ive changed ‘mother’, so that if /usbdrive/Patches is present, it will use that, if not then it will look for /sdcard/Patches… if thats not present it will assume /usbdrive/Patches (i.e. to give current behaviour)

this works well I think, since it means you can use the usb drive to ‘override’ the internal patches

Im also planning to do the same behaviour for system/scripts e.g. priority is /usbdrive/system -> /sdcard/system -> /root.

See above from the master.

[dbetz]

Thanks! I guess this is using the extra space for an additional filesystem. I was kind of hoping to expand the existing filesystem to use all of the available space. Maybe it’s actually better to create a separate filesystem though.

[thetechnobear]

@dbetz

Thanks! I guess this is using the extra space for an additional filesystem. I was kind of hoping to expand the existing filesystem to use all of the available space. Maybe it’s actually better to create a separate filesystem though.

the existing sdcard you have, assuming its the official C&G one, is 4gb.

afaik, the new 8gb is not prepared yet… and i suspect might come after ive fixed a couple of things
when that comes out, then there are indeed to FS, one for the OS which is normally readonly (4gb) , and a second one for the patch/user area… (4gb)… so its ‘trivial’ to destroy the user area one, and recreate it.

the reason we cant so this with the existing 4gb image, is because it would require that image to be complete regenerated… as generally you can expand partition not shrink them.

as for auto expanding… these kind of things usually required LVM, and associated tools, which im not sure are in the Organelle image, which has been stripped of quite a few tools (especially graphical ones) as its a music focused device rather than a general OS (like rPI)… also the kernel is a bit older, so this also wont support everything you see on the latest pi images.

but you can always go and check for yourself, i know i manage to get some of the lvm tools on my dev organelle… though i dont know how, or when

for me, I try to balance, getting as much out of Organelle as I can, but without spending all my time hacking it like i might a generic linux box… after all, for me, its primarily a musical instrument

[dbetz]

The card that came with my Organelle is 8gb. I didn’t notice that only 4gb was actually used. Anyway, I guess I’m going to buy a few 16gb cards to start mainly because that’s the smallest card they have at my local BestBuy. As you say, this is a musical instrument not a general purpose computer so it may not be critical to have a huge amount of storage available. I mainly want space to store pipe organ samples if I can figure out how to get them to play on the Organelle.

[Wannop]

@dbetz
You should probably use this for your organ sample based patch man. If you have a sample for each key that is. You will need to rename your samples 1.wav 2.wav up to 49.wav etc and place them in the sampler style 49 folder - replacing the original samples.

[shreeswifty]

i sourced some 64GB cards @ Walmart of all places for like 26$

[thetechnobear]

be careful with large card sizes, they have larger block sizes so can actually be less efficient to use.
(really 8 and 16gb are a good sweet point imo)