One more thing from last night that was a bit too boring to put into the main exposition: I upgraded the CF card to a faster one. The secret here is that if you have a suitably fast CF card then static machines can be used in most places and you can use the onboard memory. Since onboard memory is small (84mb) this can be nice. It's probably OK to wait until you actually run into the problem unless you've already got fast CF cards around, but I'll talk about it here anyway.
CF cards are, as a standard, maxed out. There will be no faster ones made. Further, Octatrack is limited in the size of card it can process. This could be read as a problem, but it makes it easy to figure out how to get the best performance out of an Octatrack: any 64gb 160 mb/s (or, equivalently, 1066x) card will achieve top performance for an Octatrack for all time.
So, pick a card and install it. In the simplest, you do this by pressing the little button on the back and then pressing it again (it "pops out") to eject the card and then you (carefully) put your own one in. Octatrack will wonder why the project it used to be looking at is gone (or, if you're just booting, it'll tell you there aren't any projects at all and will ask you to create a new project and a set for it to live in.
More than just installing the new card, I wanted to pull the demo track over, too. To do this you plug the USB cable into your computer and put Octatrack into USB drive mode. USB drive mode is accessed by pressing the "Project" button, going to system, and hitting "Yes" to, well, "USB DRIVE MODE" or something like that. The CF drive will then mount on your computer.
In my case, this worked great for the old card and I pulled the demo project over to my laptop. However, when I tried to use USB drive mode for my new card it didn't mount. I was able to debug this by reformatting it (format it to FAT-32) and then trying a couple re-mounts it worked fine from then on. I copied all of the files over (as well as Monolith which I'd like to play with later), ejected the drive, and Octatrack was completely happy.
As a final note, I'd like to argue for why I wanted to upgrade the CF drive. The one Octatrack comes with is already 16 Gb which is plenty for quite a few projects, but it's not particularly fast: just 266x. The "266x" here means 266x faster than a CD read which is kind of archaic but straightforward. CD read speed is something like 150 kB/s so this is about 37 mB/s. My new card is 160 mB/s and so about 4x faster.
Why is this valuable? With 4x the streaming bandwidth from the CF card I can leverage static machines further and preserve system memory for recording longer loops in higher fidelity. Since I like the idea of using Octatrack as a super-looper this is something that's pretty important to me, so I went ahead and upgraded.
Maybe a waste of money, but I have cameras which use CF too, so it's dual purpose.