Hello
I'm a new Spark user and I'm pleased with the hardware and sound banks, but I feel there's something crucial missing for it being in the center of my production workflow :
really quick & easy browsing of external sample folders.
It looks like the philosophy of Spark tries to encourage doing everything using your built-in sample banks/drum synth. Ok, you can "click to add a sample" if you insist using something else, and then a very minimalistic file browser pops up, but it looks like nothing is done to make this easy.
"Auto preview" for example, doesn't load the sample in the pad automatically to hear it in the context of the running pattern. This is a must when you have thousands of sounds in a folder !
Don't get me wrong : I think the Spark kits sound great and I understand that one should think of Spark as a hardware drum machine, but let's face it :
In a real life situation a producer will have accumulated
years of custom made kicks/snares, or be using external packs like Vengeance's.
You can't ask us to stop using them overnight even if Spark sounds are great, so you should make it really easy to re-use what we had before Spark inside Spark
Of course, I can always put my external samples as audio in the DAW, or use another software drum machine in addition to Spark (especially for sliced loops), but this kind of defeats the purpose of a hands-on, creative drum composition tool, doesn't it ?
I'd love to be able to have everything in Spark and on the hardware controller !
I'm not even asking for advanced loop slicing like Geist or Maschine (even though that would be GREAT), but at the minimum : make it really fast and easy to browse and use external drum samples inside Spark. The "xfer nerve" browser is a great example of that (just one keypress to switch to the next sample in the folder, and when pressing alt/option at the same time it even switches *every* instrument's sample to the next one in their respective folder)
Thanks for reading !