Best Format for Bouncing?

[Cavet Your Eruptor]

I am going to be burning a CD of a song I've been working on. So far I bounced to an .mp3 so I could post it on a webpage ( www.myspace.com/cavetyoureruptor ). Now I want to burn it to a CD and I want it to sound as good as possible. Which would be the best format for that? AIFF? WAV? Thanks!!

[Bazzle]

If you are going to burn it with your Windows sofware, bounce it as 16bit stereo interleaved.If you are going to master it with another program(Soundforge,Wavelab Etc)bounce it at the bit and sample rate you are using for the session, and convert it in the mastering program.

[Rock_Artist]

All of the current non-compressed bounce formats are PCM based.

AIFF or WAVE both will be the best and capable of bouncing even @ 96khz - 192khz. unlike SDII (Mac Only*...)

If you plan on sending the material to a mastering facility 24bit files would be the best as you'd expect them to dither the files if required.

If you plan to burn a "Master" CD by yourself without other process than you should remember to dither the master fader so you'll get down to 16bit.

You may also consider some limiting/"maximizing" (L1,L2,L3,Maxim,EA's new limiter, etc...) to gain some level. (Ofcourse you should check it as it might not be transpert as you'd want).

You should go Multiple Mono or Stereo Interleaved depends on the software/facility requirements.

Wavelab is very capable of making Audio-CDs in a friendly and reliable way.
Nero, WMP and others also capable of writing CDs.
I'm not sure how much conversion being done by the software but WAVE/AIFF always converted into the CDDA format. (Also PCM so I'm almost sure there is no true conversion)

And the burning process is mostly the media & burner today since ATAPI standards are being used by all software...