It seems a little pricey to me....groove percussion is pretty low end, crappy B8 cymbals, no bottom hoops or heads on toms, cheap hardware and stands....I would think $2-300 is more realistic for that....and $300 would be pushing the high end.
You need to figure out how to get the audio out of the ipad, if I understand correctly. Have you tried using the headphone out of the ipad and connecting that to your interface? It sounds like you just have a midi connection from your keyboard to ipad to me....and midi is not audio....it is...
There is a website called VSPlanet.com that is geared around the Roland VS series recorders.
You might want to create an account at VSPlanet and ask your question on the 2480 forum. There are a lot of guys who are very knowledgable about the VS recorders over there.
Nah...it won't hurt the 244....it's running the tape at the 244's normal speed. It doesn't matter that the tape you are playing back was recorded at a different speed.
Another option would be to record the speeded up tracks to a computer, and then use software to slow it down. If you already have an interface, you might want to give that a shot, and see how it sounds.