TC Works Spark

» see tcworks.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Everything I knew about audio software in 2002 I had picked up on a Windows machine in an internet cafe, and none of it was mastering. Spark was for the other end of the process entirely, the part where somebody who already owns a Macintosh and a decent sound card decides what the record is going to sound like on the disc.

TC Works was the software subsidiary of TC Electronic, the Danish company that had been making effects boxes since 1976, and until 1999 it had only ever shipped plug-ins that ran inside other people's programs. Spark was the move out of the rack and onto the desktop: a two-track editor for Mac OS, announced in May 1999, that read from an ASIO sound card at up to 24-bit and 96 kHz and could pull audio straight off a CD-ROM drive. When you were done it wrote out an Adaptec playlist, because in 1999 burning the CD was still somebody else's job.

Christopher Breen reviewed it in the January 2000 issue of Macworld, by which point the thing had a shape nobody else quite had. It was not a multitrack recorder and it did not want to be. What it wanted was the last hour of the work, after the recording was finished and before the disc went out.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ one window ~

The pitch was that everything lived in one place, from the file browser through to the final level. The Mix write-up from the announcement is slightly more honest about it and describes two: a Browser View holding the waveform editing and the play list, and a Master View holding the levels and the real-time processing. In the middle of that second window sat the piece people actually remember, the FXmachine, a routing matrix where you dragged plug-ins into a grid and wired them to each other instead of stacking them in a list. That idea is how most modular effects racks work now.

~ the sparks ~

By 2001 the product had split into a small family. Spark ME was free, announced in November 2001, and it existed because Mac OS X had arrived with almost no audio software on it. Spark XL was the flagship, bundled with enough plug-ins to justify its price and later given TDM support so it could sit inside Pro Tools rigs. There was a cut-down version bundled with TC's own PowerCore cards and another sold only through the company's web shop.

Version 2.8 of Spark XL was the one that dropped Mac OS 9 and went OS X only. That update is the last substantial thing that happened to it.

~ the quiet exit ~

There was no announcement that anyone has found. Development stops in 2003, a June 2004 note in EQ about Mac editors is the citation everyone falls back on for the discontinuation, and after that the product is simply absent from a catalog it used to be in. In 2005 TC Works was reintegrated into TC Electronic, which is the corporate way of saying a subsidiary stopped being a separate thing.

TC Electronic is still trading, owned since August 2015 by the holding company behind Behringer, and still making the effects hardware it started with in the seventies. The software arm that tried to go its own way for six years is the part that did not come through. tcworks.de is a domain parking page now, and tcworks.com belongs to an internet provider in Arkansas that has never heard of any of this.

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