ive been scouring the search engine for 30 minutes looking for an answer but i must be a terrible pilot of the search engine!

i have a tascam fw-1884 interface, its nice, good quality. i go from the 1884 headphones output into the RCA line in on my 404 to record. sounds good enough. however, i dont have a card reader and i have never tried to use one. im wondering if importing sounds directly onto the card itself will result in better sound quality once on the sampler?

ok simple summary: will using a card reader to import samples as opposed to line-in recording increase fidelity?

probably. id believe that transporting the original samples to the card would give you the original samples quality. and recording it through the line in might lose something. maybe not enough for our human ears to pick up. but if your worried about sound quality that you cant even judge with your own ears, then dont worry about it. its all about what you hear more than anything, so if it sounds good, its good, if you wanna be an expert at sound quality then go to school for it. otherwise keep it raw and original.

i find that it does give a better quality

mmmm

how much better?
and do you have a good soundcard with a 1/4" output when you're sampling through the RCA ins?

another question is when one imports a sound directly onto the card how does one control the volume? if the sound is bounced at like -0.1 db and put onto the card through the card reader and onto the 404 will it be as loud as possible without clipping?

its worth doing
i dont go out of my way to do it, but if i obtain or create samples that are already digital then i import them

I think the best thing about importing samples by card, is that you dont have to re-find the start/end points again (provided the sample was already chopped proply)

If talking about an original 404, which ever way the sound comes in, some fidelity is lost because the original uses a lossy data compression, although it's not really noticeable.

Card import will preserve the volume, although the data compression might change it very, very slightly. If you can, it might be safe to make samples not louder than -0.3dB, because the data compression might send it into clipping on peaks just as mp3 can do - although you might not necessarily notice little bits of clipping. This -0.3dB happens to be what I've seen recommended for stereo masters to stop whatever playback or encoding system clipping.

If you tend to have a lot of samples playing at once - then maybe importing samples normalised to -6dB might save you having to turn every sample pad down to stop clipping the mix or a master FX. It's like on mixer faders with a lot of tracks playing, the stereo bus would clip if everything was running in at 0dB - with a busy mix, every channel might have to be as low as -12dB.

BTW, importing via memory card can be very slow compared to recording them in.

Jim

we call that rolling time