i don't have an audiophile2496 cuz i record with a njb3, but basically its just a soundcard with a digi in connection. the card is also bit perfect wich is VERY important. dat's record at 16/44.1 (cd quality - in fact, if you want to burn your audio to a cd, you have to resample a 16/48 recording to this anyway) or 16/48. the audiophile 2496 won't hurt the recording/transfer at all just because its 16 bit.
for recording software, popular choices are sound forge, cool edit pro (now adobe audition), and steinberg's wave lab. Basically when you transfer, you'll have to play the dat into your pc and record it in real time. If the recording is 16/48 you'll have to downsample to 16/44.1 if you plan on making an audio cd of your recording, you should do that in this program too.
Then its on to splitting or tracking your recording. Jump over to
www.etree.org and read about sector boundaries and whatnot. cd wave editor is the popular tracking software of choice...i'm sure that this is freeware. Track your recording on the sector boundaries, also make sure to end the recording on a sector boundary too.
Once you're done with that, if you plan on sharing it on the web, or just want a back up of it, you should shn/flac it. shn and flac are pretty much the same thing, but flac is more popular these days because of its better compression and the benefit that it can also do 24bit encoding. you can pick up the flac frontend
here. I'm pretty sure that cd wave editor now has the option to encode directly to flac when you save your tracked recording. flacs will play in winamp too, the plugin comes bundled with the frontend.
and bam, your recording is now on your computer.