Arturia Forums

DRUMS => Spark => Spark Technical Issues => Topic started by: rodanmusic on December 11, 2012, 05:07:41 am

Title: Spark misses first note
Post by: rodanmusic on December 11, 2012, 05:07:41 am
Spark is missing the first note at the start of the loop whenever I have my DAW loop mode engaged at at length of 4 bars.  If I put it at two bars it is fine.

I am also using maschine in the DAW and it does not have this behavior. 

This is a weird one and I'm sure I've just set something up wrong because I just re-installed everything and it was working before. 

Any ideas?  It is driving me nuts.

Title: Re: Spark misses first note
Post by: mauronedj on December 11, 2012, 10:12:35 am
I think that this occurs because your daw has PDC and it does not work well....

Do you work with ableton?

Same problem here!
Just try to rise up the Latency of your card, or change DAW (I personally love ableton, so I don't! :D)
Title: Re: Spark misses first note
Post by: Seb on December 11, 2012, 02:41:25 pm
Is your sequence in Spark 4 bars long?

Divide the length of your sequence by 2 in Spark, and loop on 2 bars in your Dasw, does it have the same behavior?

What I'm trying to say is that this may be due to the fact that Spark and your Daw restart their sequence at the same time when looping on 4 bars, which doesn't occur when looping on two bars.
Title: Re: Spark misses first note
Post by: The01Habiitat on December 12, 2012, 06:39:46 pm
Rodan, i have the same issue. ive had it as long as ive had spark and arturia hasent helped me with it. i guess their products like these, are supposed to be stand alone. the high end stuff works really well, but like this new piece and the minibrute, there are bugs to be worked out. can you send "learned" midi notes to the pattern buttons? mine allows me to but only it remembers the "learned" notes for only that one session. if i close ableton, i can kiss those "learned" notes good bye.
Arturia has alot of great ideas, but they dont follow through, and youre never going to hit it out of the park if you dont follow through. But they dont play baseball in europe either...
Title: Re: Spark misses first note
Post by: beanyles on December 13, 2012, 12:34:25 am
I had the same problem with version 1.5, so i downgraded to 1.4.1 and everything is fine now. Waiting on an update for 1.5, hopefully it will be resolved.
Title: Re: Spark misses first note
Post by: rodanmusic on December 17, 2012, 01:26:42 am
Is your sequence in Spark 4 bars long?

Divide the length of your sequence by 2 in Spark, and loop on 2 bars in your Dasw, does it have the same behavior?

What I'm trying to say is that this may be due to the fact that Spark and your Daw restart their sequence at the same time when looping on 4 bars, which doesn't occur when looping on two bars.

Hi, yeah my sequence was only 2 bars long, but I would have expected it to just loop the sequence twice as long in a 4 bar loop.  I am noticing now that it does this on all loop lengths in my DAW.  So If I put it to 2 bars it loops fine the first loop but misses the first step upon ending of second loop, so I am guessing your assumption about the sequencing restart is part of the issue.  Like you though I love my DAW and went through like 10 of them till I found this one and there is no way I'm leaving Studio One.  It's just too good compared to the others for me :)


Rodan, i have the same issue. ive had it as long as ive had spark and arturia hasent helped me with it. i guess their products like these, are supposed to be stand alone. the high end stuff works really well, but like this new piece and the minibrute, there are bugs to be worked out. can you send "learned" midi notes to the pattern buttons? mine allows me to but only it remembers the "learned" notes for only that one session. if i close ableton, i can kiss those "learned" notes good bye.
Arturia has alot of great ideas, but they dont follow through, and youre never going to hit it out of the park if you dont follow through. But they dont play baseball in europe either...

What do you mean learned midi notes? Do you mean notes in my piano roll to the Spark? If so yes I can do this just fine.  I am also able to send midi cc to it and use the Spark to control my internal vst instruments in midi mode.  As for your last sentence, I agree.  I have had a lot of disappointments with this instrument, but at the same time I love the workflow and how easy it is to get a groove going, and I love the sound so I will keep on using it.  People often say that limitations are a good thing when doing creative work and I agree for the most part although it would be nice to not have to deal with simple issues such as these and instead be able to focus on just writing beats.  Unfortunately I've found that with music production you usually end up running into more and more issues the more stuff you add to your set up, and with that thought I don't think I'll be adding anything further for a long while!

As for the original issue I have to say thanks to Beanyles.  This is obviously a bug as I downgraded to 1.4 and now the problem is gone.  As i don't use or really need any of the features of 1.5 I'll just stick with 1.4.  I believe the new kits will be in 1.4 since I've already installed them.
Title: Re: Spark misses first note
Post by: beanyles on December 20, 2012, 01:22:42 pm
Glad to help rodanmusic, 1.5 has mayor bugs, as I pointed out on another post the "stack mode" for loading your own samples is totally useless too.
Title: Re: Spark misses first note
Post by: rodanmusic on December 21, 2012, 12:33:41 am
beanyles,

I actually downgraded to fix this problem and then in order to get the midi stop start back I re upgraded to 1.5 and now it doesn't have this issue...weird.
Title: Re: Spark misses first note
Post by: Kevin on December 21, 2012, 09:16:23 am
Glad to help rodanmusic, 1.5 has mayor bugs, as I pointed out on another post the "stack mode" for loading your own samples is totally useless too.

Hi beanyles,
sorry for not getting back to you sooner about the layer mode bug.
I encountered some internal issue that did not let me build a proper version.
I will try to do it ASAP.

Kevin
Title: Re: Spark misses first note
Post by: midimatik on December 26, 2012, 12:26:11 am
I´m very interested in a fix too  ;D

Title: Re: Spark misses first note
Post by: midimatik on January 06, 2013, 08:09:10 pm
So what about this Problem? Is anybody working on it?
Title: Re: Spark misses first note
Post by: stevism on January 06, 2013, 09:19:39 pm
mine doesn't miss a note, but instead doubles the first note  ???

i just recently got it, so i've only worked with 1.5

i have same amount of bars / im using reaper
Title: Re: Spark misses first note
Post by: rodanmusic on January 07, 2013, 05:48:43 pm
I just re-installed spark and it worked for me, otherwise I couldn't get it to work.

stevism I've had that problem before using battery in Reaper and I believe it is actually related to Reaper itself.  There are some topics about it on the reaper.fm forums that have made me believe it is related to reaper unfortunately. 

I can't remember if I was able to get rid of the problem.  A couple things to check:

1. plugin delay compensation
2. make sure there are no little tiny notes on that first step.  I found a lot of the time that when I recorded the loop wouldn't be perfect and I'd have a little tiny note that was hardly visible until zoomed far in.

Of course this was happening to me me with Battery so it might not apply to Spark; however, I did have it happen on like 3 or 4 different drum plugs.

Good luck!
Title: Re: Spark misses first note
Post by: stevism on January 07, 2013, 08:44:22 pm
I just re-installed spark and it worked for me, otherwise I couldn't get it to work.

stevism I've had that problem before using battery in Reaper and I believe it is actually related to Reaper itself.  There are some topics about it on the reaper.fm forums that have made me believe it is related to reaper unfortunately. 

I can't remember if I was able to get rid of the problem.  A couple things to check:

1. plugin delay compensation
2. make sure there are no little tiny notes on that first step.  I found a lot of the time that when I recorded the loop wouldn't be perfect and I'd have a little tiny note that was hardly visible until zoomed far in.

Of course this was happening to me me with Battery so it might not apply to Spark; however, I did have it happen on like 3 or 4 different drum plugs.

Good luck!

ah, didn't even think of that! thanks for all the great advice!

this is my first time using a drum vst, before this i was just using a chain of ReaSamplomatic5000s with samples assigned to different midi notes...and that never had an issues when looping patterns

thanks again  :)
Title: Re: Spark misses first note
Post by: rodanmusic on January 07, 2013, 11:06:20 pm
No problem, hope you can figure it out.  I know when that was happening to me it drove me mad!
Title: Re: Spark misses first note
Post by: midimatik on January 13, 2013, 09:01:21 pm
I´amworking with Spark stand alone, not in reaper or any DAW.

I got an Octatrack as Master for all my "things" and when i press the Play Button
everything is starting fine but the first note on the Spark is not playing.

Title: Re: Spark misses first note
Post by: punkdSICO on January 16, 2013, 08:31:27 am
No problem, hope you can figure it out.  I know when that was happening to me it drove me mad!
This started happening to me aswell after my last update, without changing any other setting in Live (PC).  Saying this, I have not tried to resolve it yet so cant really complain..

My symptoms are: put Live in a Loop of any size; Spark will now misses the first note of the loop.

Thanks,

Paul
Title: Re: Spark misses first note
Post by: legreg6 on January 16, 2013, 12:44:31 pm
Same thing here, with Logic 9.1.8 and Mac OSX 10.6.8
First note missing on very first beat of loop. Not 100% of the time though but annoying enough.
At this point, since it seems to be an issue on different DAWs and different systems, it deninitely looks like it is something Arturia needs to fix.
Any news on some upcoming update ?

Update : This is also happening in Ableton...and actually more systematically and it loses sync on that 1st beat. Almost sounds like a late drummer who eventually catches up on the 2nd beat.
Title: Re: Spark misses first note
Post by: Kevin on January 16, 2013, 01:52:22 pm
Hi all,
I am currently very busy for the NAMM preparation (keep an eye on Spark :)) so I can not work on this issue.
I will try to find some time after.

Kevin
Title: Re: Spark misses first note
Post by: punkdSICO on January 18, 2013, 04:11:40 pm
I am currently very busy for the NAMM preparation (keep an eye on Spark :)) 
Mr Tease!!!   ;D  Very intriguing..

Paul
Title: Re: Spark misses first note
Post by: rodanmusic on January 18, 2013, 05:42:33 pm
That would be awesome Kevin thanks!

Also hoping to see some new Spark stuff!!! Spark 2.0 would be awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Title: Re: Spark misses first note
Post by: midimatik on January 22, 2013, 09:02:42 am
Don´t know if this has anything to do with the "Spark misses first Note" issue...

Iám always working with 64 Steps, the very first note after starting thru my master (octatrack) is
not played, after that when the spark goes from the last step to the first again everything is fine.

BUT, the Stepsequencerpad #1 NEVER lights up...

No really Problem but maybee it has something to do with our Problem...
Title: Re: Spark misses first note
Post by: rodanmusic on January 22, 2013, 05:02:45 pm
I don't normally have the light issue, but I have had that where the sounds are playing but no lights.  Or even the opposite where there are lights but no sound.
Title: Re: Spark misses first note
Post by: mauronedj on February 15, 2013, 09:55:38 am
Ok I can reproduce this problem right now, ableton9 Win8 all 64 bit!

I can't understand why, I think thats an ableton PDC issue but with other drum machines (microtonic for ex) this issue is not here!

Kevin can you try it?

Thanks,
Mauro.
Title: Re: Spark misses first note
Post by: Kevin on February 15, 2013, 01:24:24 pm
We have worked on this and hopefully you will confirm that this is fixed in the 1.6.1.

Kevin
Title: Re: Spark misses first note
Post by: mauronedj on February 15, 2013, 01:56:35 pm
We have worked on this and hopefully you will confirm that this is fixed in the 1.6.1.

Kevin
Really good Kevin, thanks!
Title: Re: Spark misses first note
Post by: rodanmusic on February 15, 2013, 02:52:20 pm
Kevin this is great news! Thank you all for your work on fixing this!