Ensuring that no spontaneous but memorable riff ever gets forgotten, Gibson has teamed up with Tascam to create the next-generation of audio cables that actually records everything being played on an instrument, for up to eight solid hours on a single AA battery. It’s like a dashcam for catching musical accidents you definitely want to remember.
Available May 15 for about a hundred bucks, the 6mm Gibson Memory Cable has a small but unobtrusive bulge halfway down its length that houses a Tascam-made digital recorder. Capturing CD-quality, 44.1kHz 16-bit time-stamped WAV files, the cable can record for up to 13 hours on an included 4GB microSD card, but its battery will conk out well before that.
A continuous record mode simply captures everything passing through the cable once activated, but there’s also an auto mode that only records when there’s an actual signal, maximising the cable’s file storage. It can still be used as a standard quarter-inch audio cable when the battery is dead or removed though. So while it’s expensive at $100, it will still be a useful addition to any serious musician’s toolkit, or an amateur who can’t afford dedicated recording gear. [Gibson via Gizmag]