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Track16 — Desktop audio interface with effects and mixing


Waken your inner engineer with the Track16’s many advanced extras.

Optical expansion

Need more inputs and outputs?

Connect a MOTU 8pre to the Track16's optical input and you now have an additional eight mic inputs with individual preamps. Or connect any optical device to further expand the inputs and outputs of your Track16 system. Best of all, the optical ports are fully integrated into Track16's on-board mixing environment, with seamless side-by-side operation with all other Track16 channels.

FireWire / USB2 expansion

Add more interfaces as your needs grow

Add a second Track16 or other MOTU audio interface as your needs grow, by daisy-chaining or by using a standard FireWire or USB 2.0 hub. The Track16 provides driver-level support for resolving multiple interfaces with each other so that their audio streams never drift apart over time during recording or playback.

Customized backlighting

Choose colors that work best for your eyes

Track16's buttons are backlit with multi-color LEDs to facilitate operation in dark studio or stage environments. From the factory, the buttons glow amber (orange), except for the currently selected channel, which glows bright green. Six other color schemes are available in various combinations of green, red and amber.

Click the "METERS" button to cycle through the color combinations.

Direct SMPTE time code sync

No separate synchronizer required

You can resolve the Track16 directly to SMPTE time code, without a dedicated synchronizer, via any analog input. The Track16 employs DDS, a DSP-driven phase-lock engine with sophisticated filtering that provides fast lockup times and sub-frame accuracy. This technology represents the very latest in extremely high-performance, yet cost-effective digital audio clocking. DDS also allows the Track16 to maintain an extremely stable clock while resolved to incoming clock sources that have substantially more jitter than the Track16 itself.

SMPTE Console software

Synchronization made easy

The included SMPTE Console™ software (for Mac OS X and Windows) provides a complete set of tools to generate SMPTE for striping, regenerating or slaving other devices to the computer. Like CueMix, the synchronization features are cross-platform and compatible with all audio sequencer software that supports the ASIO2 sample-accurate sync protocol.

Instrument Tuner

Accurately tune guitars and other instruments

Just open the Tuner window, play a note, and use the large graphic display to get in tune with an accuracy of one 10th of a cent (one 1,000th of a semi-tone). Being in tune has never been easier. The Tuner displays the detected note by frequency (in Hertz), note name and octave, with an adjustable reference frequency for A4 between 400 and 480 Hz. The large meter gives you a clear indication of how high or low you are from the detected pitch. Large red arrows direct you up or down as needed to zero in on the correct pitch. You can even tune phase-coherent stereo signals. The CueMix Tuner is as advanced and accurate as any dedicated hardware tuner out there.

Spectrogram "waterfall"

A cascade of information — in vivid color

Observe rich, detailed visual information about the frequency content of any signal or mix. You can expand the spectrogram to fill the entire resizable CueMix on-screen window. You can also combine the spectrogram with the FFT in the same display, as shown below, or separate them to view them individually but simultaneously.

FFT display

Visualize your frequency content

Visually monitor the frequency content of your music or other audio material as it plays. The CueMix software superimposes a Fast Fourier Transform directly on the spectrogram display so that you can see the relationship between the two for the audio material being monitored.

X-Y Plot

Check phase alignment with visual clarity




Phase Analysis

Check for phase cancellation when summing to mono





Applications for phase analysis

Phase analysis can be used for a broad range of applications
in the studio and on the stage. Here are just a few ideas.

Recording with multiple mics


Checking overall polarity

Quickly check the overall polarity in your stereo mix for phase issues.

Summing to mono


Tuning PAs or sound reinforcement



This is not your grandpa’s oscilloscope…

CueMix’s oscilloscope delivers a robust feature set combined with digital precision. Amplitude is displayed on the y-axis and time is displayed on the x-axis. The pause button lets you “freeze” the real-time display and then zoom in to the sample level for closer examination. You can choose among several different displays for stereo signals, including combined (as shown below) or split screen. The Waveform Recognition feature searches through new audio data looking for matching waveform data, and the trigger options let you specify detailed criteria for displaying the incoming signal’s waveform in the display. The oscilloscope can be used for a variety of daily studio tasks, such as analyzing and comparing harmonic content, closely inspecting transients such as drum hits, comparing timing between two signals, and performing clip detection. You can even use the oscilloscope to help you build synth patches and check them for non-obvious issues, such as DC offset.