There's a lot going on under the SAVE button and its menu. The Spider Jam User Manual and subsequent Spider Jam Advanced Guide detail all the various functions and I'm not going to repeat them all here but I would like to add some comments of my own as some of them are not as clear as they could be.
Let's start with a brief explanation of each item available – if you've installed the v2.09 update. All these options will not be available in earlier versions.
When you move a knob on the Spider Jam from its current tone setting, you may notice that an asterisk appears next to the tone named in the LCD screen. This shows that the tone has been changed. You can tweak any existing tone or make up completely new ones and save them to internal memory with a meaningful name – either a description of the tone such as 'Chicago Blues' or the name of the song that you would use it in – 'Stormy Monday'.
There are 36 memory slots that you can save your tones into. These are called User Preset and are arranged in 9 banks of 4...
1A 1B 1C 1D ... 9A, 9B, 9C, 9D.
The amp ships with default tones in these presets which you can use or overwrite. If you have a Line 6 FBV Shortboard or FBV Express, you can access some or all of these presets with the footswitches. The FBV Shortboard can select any tone from any bank, the FBV Express can only address the four tones saved to a single bank selected manually with the Select knob.
Minutes to Megs
One minute of recording saved as a mono WAV file, 16 bits, 44,100kHz requires approximately 5 Mb of memory or disk space.
This means that you have about 150 Mb of usable internal memory (if you delete the Demo file) and that a 2 Gb SD card will hold about 400 minutes of music.
For saving any recordings or loops you have created yourself. Saving to internal memory is generally faster but you are limited to about 30 minutes worth of total track time. A 1Mb or 2Mb SD card can hold many hours of track time.
Note that these recordings are saved in a proprietary .JAM format that can only be used by the Spider Jam or JM4 products. If you want to play your recordings on a computer, use 'SAVE REC MIX AS WAV TO CARD' – see below.
Wipes individual tracks from internal or external memory.
Wipes all recorded tracks in one go, freeing up internal memory.
Wipes the demo track freeing-up another three minutes worth of internal memory that you can put to better use!
Convert JAM files to WAV individually or as a batch with Jam2Wav. Versions available for PC and Mac.
Management of individual tracks between internal and external memory.
Instant backup or recall between internal memory and SD card.
Mixes any loops you have recorded along with drum or jam tracks to a single mono WAV file. You can adjust the track levels with the LEVEL button and on-screen virtual knobs but having done this, the resulting WAV file is a 'flattened' final-mix version that you can't do much more with in editing terms.
WAV files must be mono 16 bit, 44.1 MHz or the Spider Jam will not want to know! Don't even bother to try importing MP3, MP4, AIFF or Excel spreadsheets.
WAV is short for 'Waveform Audio Format' and is the main format used on Windows computers for storing raw, uncompressed audio. Because they are not compressed like MP3s, WAV files are relatively large in file size but are of very high quality suitable for audio mastering. Stereo recording facilities have been omitted from the Spider Jam as it would simply double the file size and halve the track recording time with little benefit.