I've been thinking...

[buffpants24]

Right now I am using VBR 128-192 for my Zen Micro. If I use something like VBR 32-320, will my battery life get shorter?

 

[Guust-Fi]

APS mp3 should be good choice for a small mp3 player. It makes scence to me that it would take more effort for and mp3 player to decode songs that were encoded with more compression. On the other hand 320 kbps mp3's would contain more information. I'm not sure about this, anybody else?
All by all I don't think it makes a big difference.

 

[easypeasy]

Higher quality normally translates to more work, therefore more power consumption. Raw files are another problem, because of the volume of data, more disk accesses are required and this eat up power.

 

[jpr703]

Not sure about the Micro but larger files do translate into reduced battery life on the iPod. I believe that songs are played from a cache buffer. Every time that buffer starts to empty, the hard drive has to spin up in order to send more info to it. The larger the songs, the more times the hard drive has to be accessed. It's accessing the hard drive that reduces the battery life. I'd suspect that most, if not all, disk-based players would operate in a similar fashion.