Ahead of Nashville's Summer NAMM in July, JamHub Corp. has announced that it is now shipping the Tracker MT16 Wi-Fi-enabled multitrack recorder. The portable device is designed to allow musicians to capture up to 16 channels of post-trim, pre-fader, CD-quality recordings of live performances straight from the mixing desk, and wirelessly upload the files to the cloud for post production and release.
The pre-production prototype of the MT16 has been doing the trade show rounds for quite a while now, having made its official debut at Summer NAMM 2013. The final product features eight 0.25-in inputs to the sides (two stereo, and six mono) to feed in signals direct from the mixing desk via TRS cables. There's also a single connection point for hooking the Tracker up to the company's JamHub studio hub via the included cable or for plugging in the optional 16-channel breakout cable. Line-level instruments can also be plugged directly into the device.
The recorder automatically powers on when it's plugged in and will shut down when unplugged. It records tracks in high resolution WAV or MP3 audio file format to SD card, so if the computer running your favored DAW software is on site, you can just pop out the SD card and drag and drop the files for on the spot post production.
An Ethernet port caters for direct connection to a home/studio/rehearsal room/venue router, but the MT16 also packs a built in Wi-Fi wireless antenna for the uploading of tracks to the (still in beta) BandLab cloud. This effectively makes the it much less of a problem if your producer, mixing specialist or sound engineer are a world apart, allowing them to mix and publish the captured performance from wherever they happen to be.
A new iOS control app will be made available next month that will allow users to start or stop any recording from an iPhone or iPad over Wi-Fi. There's an included headphone jack to listen to individual recorded tracks, with live/real-time monitoring on the way courtesy of an upcoming software update. This update will also allow recording to an external drive via the included USB port, so that users will be able to take advantage of all 16 channels at 24-bit/96 kHz resolution.
The JamHub Tracker MT16 is shipping now for a suggested retail price of US$500.
Product page: Tracker MT16