Battery life playing VBR MP3's compared to CBR?

[BlueWeasel]

I'm trying to determine the battery life usage when playing VBR MP3's (96kbps minimum, 256kbps maximum) compared to say 192kbps CBR MP3's. I've recently gotten a Zen Xtra player, and my existing MP3's are a mix of CBR and VBR files.

I would assume that playing VBR files would use up the battery quicker compared to CBR, but I can't verify that by searching.

Is a considerable difference? I'm not an audiophile, so using 96/256 VBR or 192 CBR doesn't really matter to me. I'm not about to re-encode my existing MP3s, and this is mainly for ripping new CDs to MP3.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: BlueWeasel
I'm trying to determine the battery life usage when playing VBR MP3's (96kbps minimum, 256kbps maximum) compared to say 192kbps CBR MP3's. I've recently gotten a Zen Xtra player, and my existing MP3's are a mix of CBR and VBR files.

I would assume that playing VBR files would use up the battery quicker compared to CBR, but I can't verify that by searching.

Is a considerable difference? I'm not an audiophile, so using 96/256 VBR or 192 CBR doesn't really matter to me. I'm not about to re-encode my existing MP3s, and this is mainly for ripping new CDs to MP3.

I can't imagine there would be an appreciable difference between VBR and CBR in term sof battery life. The miniscule amount of CPU time required to figure out the variable bitrate data would be swamped by the (relatively) huge amount of processing actually required to decode the MP3 data back into raw audio.