About 24bit audio

Just bought an emu0404 today and wow! a lot of difference over my previous sb live!
I use winamp to play my music and since this card is 24bit i was wondering if it was actually playing at that. So i found somewhere in winamp that shows info on whats currently being played and it says 16 bits per sample. Why?
I was wondering if anyone could tell me how to change it so my 0404 will play at 24bit. Or is it not as simple as that?

Thanks for any help!

 

Audio is recorded at different rates, I don't belive it can make something play at 24 if recorded at 16, though I'm not knowledgable in audio recording.

 

The music file has to be encoded at 24 bit audio for that to work.

 

Is there any software I can use to reencode all my music to 24bit?

 

There might be, but it would sound better to re-encode from the source. Of course this sound better portion might be a placebo affect.

 

Ditto with the fool,it wont sound any better it will just take up more space

 

Ye thought that would very likely be the case..its just i have nearly 2000 songs which are all downloaded..as u can guess I can't exactly encode them from the source.
To be honest who cares...16bit on the emu0404 is amazing. I love it, easily beats my old sb live. Just need to save for some nice bookshelf speakers or some monitors now :S

 

Infact, Im wondering. Say If an mp3 is encoded at 128kbps is it possible to convert/encode or whatever so the mp3 file is at 192kbps quality. I did this with all my mp3s a while back using power mp3 wma converter-some basic cheap software. I did actually notice a difference with some mp3s but I dont know if its increased the quality of them all so that i notice. How does this work, does it just cut out any irregular waves or something.
And if encoding to a higher quality from a lower quality is possible...which software is the best for doing this..lame? I sure hope I didnt encode all my mp3 just making the file larger in size.
Thanks