JAMHUB TRACKER MT16

Created by Steve Skillings of Bandlab, the now defunct Jamhub Tracker MT16 may find new life with mobile musicians.

The Jamhub company began life as a way to help musicians jam together using headphones instead of amplifiers. Ushering in the silent practice market, Jamhub created a unique mixing board that allowed multiple musicians to connect their instruments, microphones, and headphones and jam together without bothering the neighbors. Each channel of the Jamhub Studio featured mix controls allowing individual performers to adjust the volume levels of the other performers in their headphones or mute them all together. Jamhub developed a complete system of products including mixers with various numbers of inputs, built-in audio recorders, break-out cables, remote controls, and a palm-sized 16 channel audio recorder.

It is the latter that I recently discovered. Designed to connect directly to the Jamhub Studio and record individual channels of audio to either an SD card or USB drive, the Jamhub Tracker MT16 can also be used as a stand-alone recorder. It includes six ¼” mono inputs and two ¼” stereo inputs, allowing you to record up to ten audio tracks at once. What makes the MT16 unique is that it is designed to utilize the insert jacks on your mixer to send and receive audio from the individual channels. Because of this, it doesnʼt have itʼs own mixer or volume controls. It is simply designed to capture audio. The individual tracks captured to the SD card are packaged into a BND file, which combines all the individual tracks into one file, similar to a .zip file, allowing you to easily move it from the SD card to your computer. A BND file can then be opened in a program like Audacity and separated into the individual tracks for editing and mixing in your favorite digital audio workstation (DAW).

I searched for quite a while to find a portable multitrack audio recorder with multiple inputs. I used a stereo field recorder for a long time but, if I wasnʼt satisfied with the mix after a performance there wasnʼt much I could do to fix it. Back then, I was hard pressed to find any recorders that had more than four inputs in a size that would fit into my case, or was within my budget. Today, there are a few recorders that offer six or more inputs and would be small enough, like the Zoom H8. However, at $400 it is still a bit pricey. With a quick internet search you can find brand-new MT16 recorders for under $50 and at that price you get 10 mono inputs.

The MT16 isnʼt for everyone. It was designed to be added to the Jamhub Studio and because of that it doesnʼt include many of the standard features you will find on other stand-alone recorders. There arenʼt many options or controls. You canʼt adjust the input or playback volume. It doesnʼt have phantom power or XLR inputs. Depending on your mixer, you may have to have additional cables and splitters to connect it to your other equipment. And once your are finished recording, you have to use a computer to split the file into individual tracks and edit them with a DAW.

Despite the negatives, I think this recorder is pretty amazing. It is not much larger than your smartphone, it records to inexpensive SD cards, and it cost less than a tank of gasoline. With it wired into your live rig, youʼll never miss another awesome performance and once you are finished recording, youʼll have the freedom to edit to your heartʼs content.