Loading your own music into the Spark app
-
There’s a lot to love about the Spark and it’s associated app, but there is one main problem with it for me and it was the main use case I had. My guitar teacher will often send audio files of pieces we have been practicing. I had hoped that Spark would allow me to load these and slow them down, loop parts etc. Unfortunately it seems I have misunderstood how Spark interacts with your iTunes library. It appears that it doesn’t do anything to the audio in iTunes and instead looks for the song on YouTube and processes that instead. Thus, if the piece of music isn’t on youtube then you’re out of luck with loading it into Spark.
Have I got this right and has anyone found a workaround?
Greig
-
@scottishdad98 that's an outstanding use-case! Being able to share "clips" would be an great feature...
-
Completely agree. My work around is to create my own YouTube channel and upload my backing tracks there. The downside is that they have to be "public" or else Spark won't find them. I don't know if it's a compliment but after uploading one track I got a notice telling me that the tune I'd uploaded infringed Dire Straits copyright! As its strictly not for profit/all ad revenue turned off, I think I might be okay 😱 Originally I thought the tracks could be stored on my iPhone along with the spark app. Some way of storing my own stuff offline would be great otherwise the spark only works with a good internet connection?
@scottishdad98 said in Loading your own music into the Spark app:
There’s a lot to love about the Spark and it’s associated app, but there is one main problem with it for me and it was the main use case I had. My guitar teacher will often send audio files of pieces we have been practicing. I had hoped that Spark would allow me to load these and slow them down, loop parts etc. Unfortunately it seems I have misunderstood how Spark interacts with your iTunes library. It appears that it doesn’t do anything to the audio in iTunes and instead looks for the song on YouTube and processes that instead. Thus, if the piece of music isn’t on youtube then you’re out of luck with loading it into Spark.
Have I got this right and has anyone found a workaround?
Greig
-
@mailbox You can connect the headphone output from your phone to the aux input on the amp and then you can use any app on your phone to play your own backing tracks. So if you have an app that will allow slowing down and looping of audio files you can have what you want, just maybe not as conveniently as you had hoped.
-
It can/sorta work wirelessly this way on an iPad (multitasking) I connect the iPad to Spark 40 Bluetooth and run Apple Music - then also open the Spark App let it connect and just rely on the Amp controls.
iOS14 just released at the Apple dev conference, and coming this Fall, finally brings the iPad multitasking switcher to the iPhone so this could be a handy hack for iThing users soon...
-
All good ideas, though a bit more hassle required than I would like. Hopefully adding your own files will be a feature in a future release.
-
I suppose you could import the tracks into PreSonus (or other daw) and play them from the computer over usb (losing the chord mapping of course)
-
@mailbox You cannot upload your audio backing track to YouTube. You need to make a video of your audio backing track, then upload the video to YouTube..........it's a bit of an Easter Egg hunt.
I didn't think playing along with my buddy's backing track he emailed me would be such a Pain In The Arse.......
-
If u have an ipad u can split screen sparky on one side to control your tones and your preferred storage on the other. I use one drive, store all my tracks on there and stream from there.
Can multitask on the android too. SOMETIMES spark will lose connection to app doing this but usually picks it right back up. https://1drv.ms/u/s!ApGZQEJdxAe2idRnYpOfO_XlPZ-c3Q?e=gd9nCz -
Thank you
-
How to load my songs to amp
-
@brian-o-donnell You don't load them to your amp. You play them through the Spark App on your phone, and play them through your amp via bluetooth.
-
We have been using this for several weeks now and it seems to be going nicely!
