Merry Xmas and happy holidays to you all!
And thanks to Arturia for this new update. I'm glad to see that Spark is developing into interesting direction.
I've been imagining the possibilities for Spark as a major performance controller in itself (without any DAW). Main thing for that would be a chance to send step sequencer Midi stuff out (via usb and its own physical MIDI outs). This thing needs quite a lot of programming for Arturia to make it happen.
Anyway there're these new MIDI-features in v1.4 which are IMO step to this direction. You can put StepSeq to send MIDI out (via usb, not via physical ports yet). You can do it standalone mode. Still few things are puzzling me:
What is this for? Why would I need to send (or play) all the same StepSeq MIDI data from Spark standalone app to somewhere? I'd like to send some specific MIDI data to for example to my Origin (to play some synth bass lines for example). Not the the whole packet. Anyway I tested this "connection" (StepSeq sending MIDI to Origin): I let Spark to play some simple synth sound from Origin. Of course this is practically useless, because you can send all or nothing. This obvious thing put aside, two other things came up: Spark could play only very short notes. "Decay" parameter did not seem to have any effect to Origins sounds decay. Other thing was synchronization (drum vs. Origin synth) was terrible. First I thought that it was because of the Sparks latency (from my sound card), but after minimizing it I realized that this was not the reason. At one time those two were in sync and moment after they were not.
To sum my view, Spark is little by little getting nice new features which are inevitable to make it what I'd like to have from it. The most important thing would be of course to make its StepSeq to play some external patterns or tracks (from spesific MIDI channel and from specific MIDI out). But these external patterns need to have chance to control note lengths (send Note on & off), velocities and so on. Also, there must be a way to syncronize them to Sparks own patterns (maybe there should be a general delay feature for these external patterns or tracks).
I'll keep dreaming....
