Moving a Tonverk library to a new SD card
By Jarl, who makes TonVault.
The Tonverk comes with a 64 GB card, and a sampler that records and resamples will fill one in the end. Moving to a bigger card is mostly copying, but the order matters, and one thing decides whether your projects still find their sounds afterwards. Every file has to end up in the same place on the new card.
Why places matter
Projects and presets don't keep their own copies of samples. They remember where each one is. The manual warns that if you move or delete a sample, or a folder with samples in it, every project that uses them is affected and the samples go missing.
Presets work the same way. TonVault reads them to check their samples, and a preset names its sample by its full path on the card, while a multi-sampled instrument names its files inside its own folder. Neither depends on which card it's on. So a library copied with every folder where it was works on the new card, and a folder renamed anywhere breaks everything that pointed into it.
Before you start
Make a backup of the old card and check that it's complete. It's your safety net if the move goes wrong. Then leave the old card exactly as it is until the new one has been played.
Preparing the new card
The manual asks for an exFAT card of at least 2 GB. On a Mac, Disk Utility formats a card as ExFAT. Formatting erases the card, so make sure you've picked the new one.
Copying
Copy the whole old card, not only the USER folder, unless you're sure nothing you use lives outside it. The factory sounds live outside USER, and a project that plays one needs it in the same place on the new card.
The simplest way to keep every place the same is to copy the contents of the old card's top level to the new card's top level in one go. If you copy from a backup instead, copy what's inside the backup, not the backup folder itself, or the new card gains an extra level and every path changes. In a TonVault backup, that's what's inside the folder named card.
Checking the new card
Put the new card in your Mac and scan it with TonVault. The number of audio files and their total size should match the old card. Then look at the health check. If a folder didn't make it, or ended up in the wrong place, every preset that now points at nothing is listed by name.
One limit, said plainly. TonVault doesn't read projects, so it can't check them for you. Load the projects you care about on the Tonverk and play them before you reuse the old card.
