Beepster
One is... how does this thing get power? Battery? What kind of battery? etc...
AA battery, lasts about 8 hours. You can use rechargeables. There's also a hearing aid-type clock battery for time-stamping files that lasts about a year (probably more), but it's not needed for operation.
Trim "knob"/level meter? Asking because obviously different guits will have different outputs (like what happens with a single coil vs. humbucker vs. active, etc) and what if I have a stompbox (or chain of stomp boxes) in front of it (or is a totally dry signal recommended... so it would be BEFORE the stompboxes)?
There's no level control, but there's lots of headroom. A raw, low-level guitar signal throws away a few bits of resolution but I was still able to use it in a recording. You can put it before or after stompboxes, one guy does both. Another tried it in an amp's effects loop and it worked.
This is more of a general audio recording question but... how difficult is it to sync the resulting recording to (like digital clock stuff) to tracks recorded on other devices? Like say I bought three of these, had two coming from an l/r output off the board (which the Gibson page says is an option) and a third on my guit. Are they gonna be really out of whack with each other when I toss them into the DAW and line the tracks up?
You get good with the nudge control
For re-amping it's easy enough to record the amp sound on a scratch track, which makes it easy to line up the audio. But most of the time I use the Memory Cable to remember stuff. If I bring it into Sonar to use, I have to figure out how to set the tempo correctly to match.
Can I use an adapter and snag vocals from an XLR mic without getting a screwed up signal?
No, the levels and impedances aren't compatible, and of course there's no phantom power. A high-impedance mic
should work, but I didn't try it because it's not one of the intended applications.
Sorry... this is just a very strange but intriguing concept to me. I'd probably do any/all of the above with a portable rig anyway but darned if this isn't giving me some ideas for capture extra dedicated signals in a live setting.
Well, my favorite thing about it is that it's a cable, and I have to use a cable anyway. This means it's always there...I don't have to look for a recorder, patch something in, or have the computer booted up. When songwriting I just leave it in place and record all the time. You can mark sections with material you like so it's easy to find data you want to pull off the card.
I would love to have had this when I was gigging over in Germany a lot to record everything I did live. It would have been a piece of cake to bring the material into Sonar and make loops out of it.
But the main thing is this kind of device is useless unless you actually use it. There have been lots of times I've just been playing around on the guitar and came up with something I wished I could have remembered. Having the recorder in the cable is very convenient, because the record button is only a push away.