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Andrea C edited this page Jan 19, 2025 · 15 revisions

This page collect information on good SD cards to use with the Deluge, tests data, and how to format the SD.

TLDR

For best performance, the Deluge benefits from an SD card which is especially good at handling random read requests. SD cards sold as 'high speed' or 'high performance' aren't necessarily good at handling random read requests. One currently sold SD card which is particularly good at this is the Kingston Canvas Go! Plus, which is typically 1.5 times the speed of other 'fast' SD cards in this regard. Note: the full size version of the Canvas Go! Plus is slightly faster than the micro SD version, so try and get the full size if you can.

Card Selection

Most consumer SD cards are intended for cameras and video cameras, and the speeds advertised are for reading and writing a single large continous file. This is often not mentioned at all. A1/A2 class is an indication of a card intended for application use, and should mean good random access speed.

Note

For Deluge what matters is random access speed.

Important

A2 is not supported by Deluge: the card will work, but isn't going to be any faster.

While specific testing for Deluge is still in early steps, in addition to the information below you may want to refer to the recommendations for the Dirtywave M8 tracker.

Good

Note

there are different performances between regular size SD adn microSD!

Decent

  • Sandisk Extreme Pro. Achieved 6-8 simultaneous streams.

Poor

  • Verbatim Premium (stock card that comes with the Deluge). Achieved 3-7 simultaneous streams.

Test procedure

Export arranger stems for a song, load them into a kit, and watch for dropouts. Kit is important as audio clips will paper over the dropouts and attempt to resume, kit rows will stop playing. The song must have enough tracks for the total audio size to exceed available memory, 12 stereo tracks at around 1 minute should do it

Formatting

The Deluge SD card must be formatted with FAT32. FAT32 can be used on devices (including SD and microSD cards) and supports partitions of size up to 2TB. FAT32 file size limit (e.g: how big can a sample be?) is 4GB.

macOS

On macOS ejecting the SD Card from the Finder will result in a newfs_msdos: /dev/diskXsY: No such file or directory error. Instead, umount the SD Card to make it available with (assuming it's called Untitled as per factory settings):

diskutil umount /Volumes/Untitled

To find the exact disk and partition needed in the next command, you can run:

diskutil list

Assuming the SD Card is /dev/disk4s1 (be very careful to choose the right disk!!!), format with (change DELUGE to your preferred name for the card):

sudo newfs_msdos -F 32 -v DELUGE -b 32768 /dev/disk4s1