I'm having difficulty understanding something. If I am choosing to have my drum sample VST samples to be 32 bit on load and am bouncing down my soft synths to WAV's at 24 bit, then do I choose to record (on my CDR 2 track) at 16 bit or 24 bit and can people I send a 24 bit CDR to, play it on a standard system. Sorry if this is a crap, basic question.

Standard CDs are 44.1k 16 bit stereo.

yes, if it is to be a "red book" audio cd that can be played on a standalone player (i.e. in your car) then it must be converted to 16/44.1 first. If you want to deliver 24-bit files or any higher sampling rate, you must burn a data CD that can only be read on a computer.

Thank you. So do mastering houses prefer 16 bit CDR or 24 bit CDR or DAT to master from. I hear that CDR's accent the higher freqencies too much.

you gotta be kidding! CDR is the sound of now man ;)

So I take it that a 16bit CDR is OK to send off for mastering then?

yes, although in a pro studio they would still use a DAT or at least a good standalone cd-burner. but for the rest of us it should be ok i believe...

[edit]

but... if your mixes are in 24bit, then you could theoreticaly send them a wav file in 24bit and leave the conversion to them, since they would (theoreticaly) have better tools to deal with it.

[Edited: 12-Oct-04  |  04:45 PM]

Thanks. Any idea what's a quality CD burner. I heard that hhb are the best because they are pioneer and use quality components.

better wait for psy to answer that i think... my studio had a DAT  

i use a pioneer 106 - very 'industry favourite' burns cd and dvd (will of course also burn large ISO UDF DVD-ROM for 4.5 ish gigabytes of backup (VERY useful for archiving whole song folders complete with audio)

you can get the 'oem' version quit affordably without a box at pc fairs