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What Is VBR And Is It A Good Thing?
A: VBR stands for Variable Bit Rate. It's a method of encoding audio to MP3 that allows for different sections of the file to be encoded at different bitrates, depending upon the demands of the source audio (some type of sounds require a higher bitrate, others encode well using a lower bitrate).
Edit: Updated info ... the good LAME MP3 encoders(version 3.90.3, I think) can control the size of the VBR MP3.
--alt-preset standard is the default VBR mode with around an average bitrate of 205-240k per song,
--alt-preset standard -Y will make it around an average bitrate of 170k-200k.
[These presets and LAME settings were developed at hydrogenaudio.org]
VBR is quite flexible with LAME, and it doesn't have to be a bloated filesize to give better quality. Usually the encoders that had those bad artifacts with VBR were xing and blade, but good encoders do VBR very well.
