Digi-Roll Studio

What it does

The part of pattern writing that isn't fun, done for you.

Elektron sequencers are wonderful and entering a sixteen-note bassline on one is not. Digi-Roll Studio is the piano roll they don't have.

Write straight to the box

Pick a destination pattern and track, press send, confirm. The notes land in the box's own sequencer — nothing to record in, no tempo to match.

Every write re-reads the destination first, saves a .syx backup of it, changes only the tracks you aimed at, then reads it back and compares every byte. Your sounds, your kit and the other fifteen tracks are untouched.

Round-trip what's already there

Fetch a pattern off the box, open it in the roll, fix the thing that was bothering you, write it back where it came from. P-locks move with the notes they belong to.

Reading is always safe — it replaces the pattern in the app, never the one on the card.

Generate parts that agree

Choose a genre and a progression and get a bassline, chords, a lead and a kick built against the same harmony, call-and-response, top down.

Motion, looseness and humanize sliders shape the feel; per-part density and octave shape the range. Lock the seed when you land on one worth keeping.

Your whole studio at once

Digitakt II, Digitone II and Analog Four side by side — up to 38 tracks, per-track length and scale, and p-lock lanes drawn right under the roll from each box's own parameters.

Internal or external clock, a fill toggle, and a panic button for when a note gets stuck.

Supported gear

What it can write to, and what it can play to.

Direct pattern writing needs a pattern format somebody has mapped byte by byte. That's three boxes so far — two gen-2 digis and, since September 2026, the gen-1 Analog Four. Everything else can still capture a pattern the old way.

Digitakt II

Direct writeFetch, edit and write patterns over SysEx, byte-verified. Gated on an allowlist of tested OS builds.

Digitone II

Direct writeSame round trip, same verification, same allowlist.

Analog Four

Direct writeThe same round trip on a gen-1 box: six tracks, 64 steps, any of 128 slots, paced for its slower wire. Velocity, length, micro-timing, trig conditions and thirteen p-lock parameters all carry. Its FX and CV tracks are read-only and come back byte-exact.

Octatrack · Digitakt · Digitone

Live recordNo SysEx write, but they take notes and clock — arm the sequencer, press play, capture the pattern.

Anything else with MIDI in

Live recordIf it receives notes and clock, it can record what Digi-Roll Studio plays.

Don't see your box?

You can map it yourself, without writing any code.

The reason the list above is three boxes long isn't difficulty — it's that mapping a pattern format needs the box in front of you, and we have three. If you own one of the others, the tool for mapping it already exists and runs in your browser.

The diff lab

Open the lab, fetch a pattern off your box, change one thing on the box, fetch it again, and the lab shows you which bytes moved. That is the entire method — it's how the Digitakt II and Digitone II formats were worked out, it's how the Analog Four's gen-1 format was mapped after them one captured question at a time, and it's how the first public documentation of the DN2 pattern format got written.

Chrome, Edge or Brave — Safari has no Web MIDI. Nothing to install and no account.

It cannot write to your box

Not by convention — by construction. Elektron's protocol uses 0x6n messages to request a dump and 0x5n to carry one; sending a 0x5n is what stores a payload. The lab's two hardware functions refuse every opcode outside the request range and throw before a byte reaches the port.

Mapping a box doesn't switch writing on for anybody either — that stays gated on an OS build somebody has verified by hand.

Open the diff labin the browser, read-only Read the walkthrough Open a mapping issue

Wanted: Syntakt, Analog Rytm, Octatrack, and the gen-1 Digitakt and Digitone.

Install

One extra click, the first time.

Digi-Roll Studio isn't code-signed — the certificates cost money every year, forever, and this is a free project with no income. macOS and Windows will therefore each make a face at it once, and here's how to get past it. Linux doesn't check, so its steps are just the install.

Why the warning appears

An unsigned app means the OS can't confirm who built it — not that anything is wrong with it. The whole source is on GitHub if you'd rather read it, or build it yourself, before running it.

Making it go away means $99 a year to Apple's developer programme, renewed forever, plus a certificate on the Windows side. That's a subscription, not a one-off, and there's nothing coming in to pay it with. If this app earns its place in your studio, buying me a Ko-fi is the one thing that would delete this entire section.

macOS

Open the downloaded .dmg and drag Digi-Roll Studio to Applications.
Launch it once. macOS will refuse, because it can't verify the developer — that's expected.
Go to System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll to the bottom, and click Open Anyway next to the message about Digi-Roll Studio.
Launch it again and confirm. macOS remembers, so this is a one-time thing.

On macOS 14 and earlier you can shortcut all of that: right-click the app, choose Open, then Open again. Sequoia removed that bypass, so on 15 and later the route above is the only one.

If macOS insists the app is damaged:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine \
  /Applications/Digi-Roll\ Studio.app

Windows

Run the downloaded installer.
SmartScreen will say it prevented an unrecognised app from starting, by Unknown publisher — the installer isn't code-signed.
Click Run anyway. If you don't see that button, click More info first and it appears — Defender shows the dialog both ways.

The warning fades on its own as more people download a given release.

Linux

Unpack the tarball.
Run the install.sh inside it — per-user, into ~/.local, no root, nothing to click past.
Launch it from your menu, or run digi_roll_studio from a terminal.

tar -xzf Digi-Roll-Studio-*-Linux-x86_64.tar.gz
cd Digi-Roll-Studio-*-Linux-x86_64
./install.sh

uninstall.sh next to it takes the three files back out. On Arch and derivatives prefer the package from the same release — it declares the libraries the graphics layer opens at runtime, so pacman refuses to install it where the app wouldn't start:

sudo pacman -U digi-roll-studio-*-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst

Built against glibc 2.35 — Debian 12, Ubuntu 22.04, Fedora 36 and newer. MIDI is ALSA: the boxes turn up as sequencer ports over USB and auto-connect claims them, and aconnect -l is the first thing to check if one doesn't appear. The tarball's INSTALL.md names the runtime libraries per distro.

Linux is new in v0.3.3. It builds, tests and packages on CI like the other two, and a Digitone II has been auto-connected and identified over ALSA from a Linux build — but no write to a box has been run from one yet. It's the same write path the macOS and Windows builds verified, and that's the honest state of it.

Before your first write

Writing to a pattern slot overwrites what's in it. Digi-Roll Studio re-reads the destination and stores a backup before it sends — a backup it can't store is a write that doesn't happen — then reads the result back and compares every byte.

Use a throwaway project on your box anyway. This is beta software writing to hardware you can't easily undo, and the habit costs you nothing. Back the project up from the box itself the first few times too.

A piano roll for your Elektron boxes.