I have an old 5 gigabyte Creative DAP Jukebox, which plays MP3's and WMA's.
I haven't used it for a while, but since I started walking on a regular basis, I'd like to listen to my music while on the run.

I'm thinking about using either the alt standard preset or just plain old 192 kbit CBR mp3's.

For me, both are transparant, so that is the not the issue.
The question is, which one will drain the battery the least?
I suspect VBR-files consume more battery, because of the everchanging bitrate, but then again, a 192 kbit file will be bigger than an alt-standard file, meaning more harddrive reading....

what are your thoughts?

which one should I use and preferably why does on use more, less or the same battery as the other?

Bitrate changes shouldn't have anything to do with power consumption. Smaller files *may* eat less power as they require less file reading / bitstream parsing to be done.

on my iriver ifp 595(flashplayer) battery life lasted less than 11 hours with mp3 ~112 kbit(-V5 --athaa-sensitivity 1). wma 160 kbit cbr lasted about 18 hours. Both full volume. Very suspecious that its the variable bitrate that sucks the battery.
Anyone knows if the " -V5 --athaa-sensitivity 1 " command line, somehow sucks more battery out of my player?

Does abr compared to vbr setting in lame, use less battery?
thx

What you found means that their WMA decoder uses less power than their MP3 decoder, please test different MP3 encodes of similar bitrate before putting conclusions how VBR "eats more power".

Forgot to say that i tried lame 3.92 - mp3 160cbr, had apr. the same battery usage as the wma 160 cbr

so lame 3.92-160kbit cbr had about 18 hours battery time(iriver ifp500)
lame 3.96-~120kbit(vbr)(-V5 --athaa-sensitivity 1) about 11 hours.
Now i will test lame 3.96~120 without the -V5 --athaa-sensitivity 1 - command line.


update:
Mp3 variable bitrate ~145 kbit WITHOUT the -V5 --athaa-sensitivity 1 - command line, gets me about double playback time! QUESTION: is Lame 3.96 (eac)128 kbit vbr without additional command line any good?
Thx