Highest Quality Input?

Provided your sample is on the computer, is it better to transfer via usb or "record in" from the aux output of ones computer?

Its so much easy to simply use the record in, but then the gain and computer volume become variables to deal with. If its a really nice sample, Ill usually isolate the portion I want in audacity, export as wav and then transfer via usb... Am I wasting my time?

Thoughts?

that's how I do all mine.. audicity batch them in folders and load to cf but i use a reader to take the MPC usb interfeace out of the loop. A card reader is faster for me.

spdif is best of both worlds if your computer has spdif out. it's a digital transfer with no loss.

some people like the ADDA conversion of the MPC - that "mpc sound" people keep blathering about.
you're not wasting your time if you want to preserve the exact sound from your PC.
we did a test a couple months back where we compared the original to a sound recorded into the MPC's analog in and you could visualize the difference in the normalized waveforms.

I'm one of those dudes who prefer to record everything in. Try things out and you'll find out what suits u best.

If you're looking for fidelity then you're better off transferring via usb. when you record it into the MPC the sound goes through 2 stages of conversion- Digital to analogue from the computers interface then analogue to digital inside the MPC. every time this conversion happens you introduce a little noise into the signal. That said, sometimes the subtle noise is exactly what you want to stop your productions sounding too clinical and clean, so i guess its just the feel you're after.... any noise introduced in 2 stages of conversion will be barely audible, it's just common practice in studios to have as few conversion stages as possible to preserve clarity hope this helps!