Hi Kevin,
I updated my Spark to 1.6.1. but missing first beat (at least via MIDI) is still there. Was it supposed to be fixed with this update or later?
And now when you have made progress with some external MIDI features like midi clock please re-think about my main suggestion: Give us a change to change MIDI out ch from different tracks. Or better, I'd add there a change to make a track to be "an external midi track" and name it how you like (for example "Origin bass") and give it some special midi ch. It cannot be that difficult, cause now you can send everything in ch1, right? With this (small?) improvement you'll have a great platform to control whole MIDI system which many of us have...